Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.
I've voiced my opposition to what I consider unrestrained capitalism and ideological free-marketerism and been downvoted many times over the years preceding the election.
I've had dang come down on me for expressing my views (it's his and the moderators' prerogative but I'm not stopping either). It doesn't bother me because that's who I am. I'd rather folks offer their disagreements than downvote my comments because that's what I'm here for: discussion and synthesis with the ideas and arguments put forth by folks who share some or none of my interests.
Even you mention "sympathy for the devil." I don't know if that's recognition that some viewpoints are truly toxic and unworthy of even basic respect and consideration or an merely an allusion to the down-voting of un-conventional views and thoughts.
For me, there is nothing interesting to discuss about ideas or views espousing racism or gender-bigotry, but those are different than discussing the factual situations of ethnicity and gender in our society as determined by historical legacies and cultural forces. I will respect the right of an individual to hold bigoted views but that doesn't mean I must respect the individual, either.
A balanced discourse is (was) no longer possible. (It's getting a bit better again after some ramnifications became plain to see in some every-day situations).
Nobody owes you space for your views. Your place, your rules. Their place, their rules. That's the deal.
I think lately we're not meeting those qualifications, so maybe it is best not to engage, since discourse would not be productive.
https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2018/02/12/m...
Edit: Or, to put it another way, if one wants to take the philosophy of enforcing norms primarily through private action, let us not forget that that applies not just to the company that owns the building, but also to everyone that company might deal with! And complaining doesn't seem like a bad start.
Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, not Louisiana. The amount of PR he’s gotten over his branding decision surrounding this move is mind blowing.
Not to mention that there are folks who support the contrarian standpoint on every one of those issues but are anti gun control.
There is not a (net) mass exodus from the Bay Area, hence the ridiculous prices. I moved to SF in 2006 and there were always people claiming it was on the verge of collapse because everyone was fed up with the high prices and crowding and was fleeing. Funny to see that nothing has changed.
“No one goes to that bar anymore, it’s too crowded!”
"Engineers tend to view themselves as much less liberal and slightly more conservative than the general public, according to a recent survey of over 1,200 readers of MACHINE DESIGN and Electronic Design magazines. The same survey also found that engineers say they are more likely to be Republican (42.1%) or Independent (33.7%) voters, as opposed to Democrats (14.5%)."
this is an interesting asymmetry I've noticed too. There are countless of places where salt of the earth Americana is the de facto monoculture.
If I'd go there and try to create a liberal-hippie space for myself they'd probably flip me the finger and tell me that's not the local way of life, and somehow everybody seems to agree that this is perfectly fine.
Yet when people in the valley or in a big city share a common culture they somehow have to defend themselves and painstakingly carve out a space for Peter Thiel et al. Why is that? If he doesn't like California's culture Thiel can move, end of story. Why do we have to treat him like a wounded deer?
The people in SV are largely more willing to challenge orthodoxy and take risks.
It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.
And believe it or not, people in the south have to (from their point of view) put up with "the liberals" too - similar to people in SF or wherever.
Frankly, what is interesting here is that instead of the United States becoming more culturally similar with the advent of planes, mobile phones, and what have you it would appear, at least on the surface, that we're becoming more different. I live in the Midwest and when I hear somebody from Vancouver saying that explaining something to someone automatically is "mansplaining" and "placing an emotional burden" on that person I find that just as idiotic and incompatible with my way of life as some bible-thumping anti-climate change person from Mississippi. Now, both of these are of course generalizations, but the most pervasive noise, if you will, is this instead of the most likely interaction I would have with most people which is just a hey how are you, thanks, yes I like XYZ as well.
What we need to do is police the most radical people if we want the United States to be a united country. If we'd rather break it up or something then that's a different story.
Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.
Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.
Don’t like being conservative in the Bay Area because you feel ostracized and judged? Cool, now you know what it feels like to be gay in 95% of America.
Get over it.
I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a libertarian tech-stereotype when I was younger, and in large part it has been from seeing the conservative half of american slide slowly further into insanity and horribleness, seemingly driven by fox news, at least among family.
When I see complaints like this I always look at the history. Usually the account in question has a pattern of posting flamebait and/or snark. In that case you needn't reach for political bias or 'wrongthink' to explain why the community downvotes such comments. They get downvoted simply because they break the site rules.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
You mean factually reporting the news? There is real and severe damage that is happening to our country and our standing in the world. The regressive politics will have consequences.
Even if you are a fan of Trump's policies, the White House is chaos, we essentially do not have a president. Imagine a real crisis hitting, and what this White House would do.
It's incredible how insulting portions are at the population that they think the very real harm (this is not normal) is just some kind of media sensation. I think you are confusing the real current administration with a season of the apprentice that Trump hosted.
Simply dismissing the concerns of tens of millions of americans as "racist and sexist" is not helpful and in fact perpetuates the problem. I am not a Trump supporter, or a Thiel supporter, but it's not self-evidently bad that a person with some means chose to work with the guy in charge to try to make a difference. This kind of lazy dismissal is part of the problem.
Worse, of course, is the personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
Time is not on their side, and I suspect History is not on their side either.
To the extent tech workers are leaving Silicon Valley, I'm willing to bet the dominant factor is the cost of housing.
While up to a ~year ago the position of "we must never ever put limits on immigration!" was hugely overrepresented in the media and by politicians. It became quite apparent that the majority of the populus does not support this stance, and that it's neither wise nor a good move to attempt the Nazikeule whenever anyone says something ever-so-slightly different from "we must never ever put limits on immigration!".
This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies (not to mention backgrounds and interests) here than pretty much any place I've lived. The main hostility I see is to intolerance, but that's hardly surprising given SF's long, welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance. [1]
If I were to worry about any sort of uniformity, it wouldn't be political, but in startup culture. 20 years of success has created some very well-greased rails into which most innovation has to fit: bright young founders, seed round followed quickly by A and B rounds. That can be fine as far as it goes, but it has become so orthodox that I think we're not a great place for doing anything other than a plausible Next Big Thing.
The irony is not obvious so here it is:
You want Damore to be ex-communicated from Google, for having an opinion you disagree with. People of HackerNews have decided to ex-communicate YOU, for having an opinion they disagree with. (Assuming that's what happened on HackerNews, and not that you were voicing your opinion in a manner that's counter-productive)
Do you see how you're crying about the very same behaviour you're all for, when it's somebody else?
The double-irony is that you're allowed to post on HackerNews again, and Damore is not back at google!
Lastly, both houses of congress passed additional sanctions against Russian with super majorities, beyond veto proof and Trump refuses to enact them. We are living in a constitutional crisis and for some reason every move Trump makes seems to benefit Russia.
This is not normal. This is not OK.
The dude is a walking billboard for the 7 deadly sins.
That, and wrongthink need not limit itself to politics. On HN we have it for technologies as well!
People with strong views simply notice the comments they dislike much more strongly. And sometimes they pass around links to their friends to 'prove' it—which proves nothing, of course, but does strongly reinforce their perception. Once reinforced, these perceptions seem not to change.
On HN the divisions are exacerbated by this being so international a community. Only a third, last I checked, is in the US, and only a small minority in SV. So what we're all encountering here is not just polarization in the US, but much disagreement across national and cultural divides.
p.s. Unless I'm mistaken about the account, we didn't ban you. Nor have we shadowbanned accounts for years (except new accounts that appear to be trolling or spamming). When an account has been around for a while, we tell people we banned them.
---
Edit: while I'm thinking about this...
Subtler factors exacerbate these perceptions too. HN isn't siloed—we have no subreddits, no following/blocking—just one big place where everyone sees the same things. Because of that, we're all more likely on HN to encounter comments from people we don't normally mix with, except perhaps on the battlefield. Reading what the 'other side' posts is not fun; it's painful. It gets right in your face and feels like being attacked. It seems to take only a few cases of this before it overflows into one's image of the site itself.
That association makes sense emotionally: I come to this place, I feel pain and anger, therefore this is a hateful place. But it's also just what one would expect from the numbers, which is why the reaction is so clockwork-reliable, as I said above. The people with opposite views to yours are feeling just the same anger and pain.
We see this not only about politics, but about programming languages, large companies, one's own work, and everything else people feel strongly about. We're all in one of those tricky spots where human feelings and statistics don't go well together, and for the most part don't realize it.
No one cares about Huntsville, AL and most high-profile people would not reside there, so no one hears about any of this bubble behavior from the other side.
The most important cities (culturally and economically) are, at least, left-leaning. So, you'll only hear about conservatives being rejected by the "liberals" in {city}.
I grew up in a conservative town. Personal experience says the bubble on that side is arguably worse and more violent. Being openly gay or not-white or not-Christian (or accepting of those things) in my hometown was a good way to end up harassed and possibly assaulted on a regular basis.
Definitely this option.
And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have nothing in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.
Not only is it not “pretty liberal” by any definition, people here aren’t any less political than people on the coasts, and they don’t “live their lives” any more, whatever that even means.
However, people here are less angry about Trump and the Republicans because they’re much more likely to have voted for him and support what he’s doing. They were plenty angry when Obama was in office.
Also, “southern charm” is real and nice at first, but in my experience it’s actually pretty shallow, cheap, and discriminatory. It’s mainly surface-level and primarily extended to non-poor white Christian conservatives. Minorities, immigrants, gays, liberals, non-Christians, and poor people are treated differently.
What concerns me most is equality of all people, and liberation of all people from systems of oppression. James Damore furthered an oppressive system (patriarchy) by perpetuating sexist ideas that attacked and hurt women at Google. With all the stuff about free speech or whatever, the opinion that he wanted to advocate for was nothing more than old school sexism: women are on average worse engineers because of their biology, so any discrepancies of outcome is a result of their natural inferiority, not broken social and economic structures. Is that really a valuable, constructive opinion that should be inside the marketplace of ideas at Google? What kind of company culture does that lead to? One in which discrepancies and injustices can be rationalized and justified through "innate differences" and where women who experience sexism and discrimination would feel more uncomfortable expressing their concerns.
The better question is: why aren’t you outraged like so many others?
And if the answer is that you don’t care or you agree with the policies in question, then perhaps the outraged people should justifiably ignore your condemnation of their outrage.
It’s ridiculous for me to claim that all conservatives were only anti-Obama’s policies because the right-leaning media whipped them into a frenzy, and it’s just as unfair and intellectually dishonest to do that to the left today.
Americans have a very weird conception of what "far-left" means. Liberal feel good minority appeasement by billion dollar multinational corporations is as far from "far-left" as you can get.
Then why do people go on so about the so-called "Hollywood Blacklist" whereby private entities refused to hire people who supported Communism?
Oh come on. I am far from a Trump supporter but this is ludicrous. How many people has he killed?
Trump is a horny old silver-spoon doofus with a knack for telling people what they want to hear. I can't stand him but Stalin he ain't.
There's nothing more libertarian than holding people accountable by exercising free association, or in this case, freedom to not associate.
If you count asians as white...
Also gonna want a cite on that. afaik sv hiring is about equal with labor market.
For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear?
You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's).
If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.
That's because it's entirely a matter of individual perspective and experience. Everyone takes their own tiny viewport onto a region of millions of diverse people and attempts to claim "oh yeah SF/bay area is like this..." "Oh no I had a different experience so you see it's like this..."
You just lose people with this hysterical hyperbole
I have zero faith that our current president cares about anything beyond himself and his image. Zero.
And I’m not alone. A shocking number of conservative writers and thinkers believe Trump represents a fundamental threat to democracy. Behind closed doors, even many of his ardent public supporters have no respect or faith in him.
That's not a coincidence. It's a direct product of cosmopolitanism. The cities that represent it most clearly are its capitals. Like any working system, it has rules. If you want the benefits, you need to play be the rules. If you don't, you're free to leave. Goodness knows your apartment won't go unfilled for long.
This is absolutely blindingly self-evident in SF and if you disagree I wonder if you have actually been there.
Seems like a PR stunt.
The political issues are important, of course. Arguably more important than other topics. That's one reason why the above is the case.
The real problem is increasing polarization of the Congress since Gingrich. We are going to keep flipping back and forth between Republican domination and Democrat domination rather than slight right majority and slight left majority with great debates and comprises until some key issues with the electoral process and congressional procedure are fixed.
I think the end result is an overhaul and optimization of government by sensible, human-oriented technologists but that is a few decades and several bitcoin bubbles away.
How can you label yourself open minded, then brand anywhere other than SV "bumblefuck, usa"? Surely you see the hypocrisy?
Conservatives have plenty of issues as well - look at Kansas or Alabama. Don't see those being discussed at a national level, though the politics that drove them into the ground as now steering the federal government.
So maybe check your article's sources first :-).
I am pretty unsympathetic to any argument that starts with "he meant to say...". I can see what he said, in black and white. I'm going to address that. He can post what "he meant to say" separately.
The media did not create deported children, paid off porn stars, and collusion with foreign governments. So let's not pretend this is on them entirely.
Like, for example, the flu season becoming a crisis because key medical manufacturers were devastated by a hurricane and found limited support from a government that barely realizes Puerto Rico is part of the US, much less that its industries are so essential.
I don't post comments on HN to stir the pot. I post comments on HN in the hope of getting other perspectives. A comment with a downvote and a reply is more valuable than a comment with upvotes and no replies. It's not like I can redeem HN points for cash and prizes.
I think I can do an OK job of not being an asshole, but I honestly have no idea what is or isn't going to piss people off or classify as flamebait here. So, if those are the stakes now, I will just have to accept my place on the shitlist.
He’s not even leaving the state. Branding his move as political exodus is marketing for his China-oriented fundraising, a capital source better serviced from Los Angeles than San Francisco.
We’ve got to figure our way out of this, all around. Even more so to tackle issues like those addressed in the submission and so clearly on display in this thread as well. An early comment lamented the current situation:
> ”Hopefully we're still at the point where we can sensibly discuss a WSJ article.”
Well, maybe not it we just complain about it rather than making contributions that make the situation better. Of course it’s important to note that there’s an issue. (Bad analogy imminent!) Bug reports are necessary. At the end of the day we’ve got to dig in and fix those bugs and close the tickets, and make the system more robust.
A confounding twist with the system we’re working on makes it hard for us to disentangle beliefs from behaviors. It’s too easy to conflate the bad behavior of those we disagree with from their beliefs. And sometimes they are guilty of bad behavior. And we also need to realize that we ourselves might be guilty of behaving badly, and work on improving that so we can be more effective in understanding and be understood.
And I’ve increasingly tried to keep in mind that there are some games we play to win, and others we play to keep playing: Discourse in the small and society in the large is most definitely the latter. The goal is not to defeat our opponents, however they may be defined: it’s to figure out how to effectively make the game better. And like any rule change, everyone needs to be persuaded that the new rules are are a good idea.
I encourage you to work on some of the open tickets. Pull requests welcome!
(Thanks for your patience. Please accept the analogies only as far as they work and are useful.)
Really? Because the only values I've heard expressed have been standard democratic talking points and once in a while far left ideologies.
Before that, it was rare for tech workers to live in SF. Most would live in South Bay and come up to SF to party on weekends.
Also, salaries went crazy in the last 8-10 years. Once all these rich tech workers came to the city that thought they knew best because they were rich and young, that's probably what caused the shift.
Sure, but ultimately, if the other party to the discussion refuses to agree, you need a decision rule.
If your views are largely about that decision rule then you look silly for not accepting it.
Coming in from New York, San Francisco’s lack of attention to its homeless population is self inflicted. It’s also a problem that nobody in the city seems very much to care about.
And so many people feel about current views.
But in both cases, if you are a bog-ordinary conservative or libertarian, it's hard to remain self-consistent and argue that private property and private contract are sacrosanct except when you don't like the outcomes.
Rent control is conservative now? All of SF policy is leftist and pro government intervention. I wonder why it fails...
Also, there's a paywall.
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/the-wall-street-jour...
Having also lived in the mid-West and SF, I would agree the mid-West leans more conservative, but in any decent sized city you'll find both view points (election resulted confirm it).
I would say SF is just the opposite of a hardcore conservative town. There is almost no consideration for having a different viewpoint. And if you happen to express one, you're certainly made to feel their is something wrong with you.
Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.
It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.
Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.
We have voting records and financial contributions to campaigns. Both tell the same exact story. San Francisco is as far left as cities get in the US.
The mistake being made by the top level parent, is thinking that there was ever actually a wide-spread libertarian burst. There was not. That was nothing more than a media meme for a few minutes, mostly thanks to Andreessen, Thiel and a few others. SF overall has been extreme left for the last 40 years plus.
Marc Andreessen for one, has entirely disappeared from the public discussion politically. He's a particularly openly avowed libertarian type in terms of beliefs. There's a reason he shut down like he did, it's the same reason Thiel is being evicted from the inner circles of tech. There is no room for mistakes in the current police state of speech that exists in SV. One mistake, stepping out of line with dogma, and you're done. Andreessen wants to stay in Silicon Valley and wants to maintain his VC firm at the top tier, so he shut his mouth to put it simply. Thiel is unwilling to go along with the political & speech requirements of continuing to exist in SV.
Because all the rich people living in the North West part of the city are completely insulated from it.
I think you're mistaking how extreme their political beliefs are with how extremely devoted to their political beliefs they are. Most of these people aren't 'far left' they're just very, very committed to their center/center-left politics.
I use it to describe any political ideology focussed on equality of outcome and legitimacy through elimination of self-judged "oppression", which is IMO as good a definition as any as the communist disasters of the 20th century.
This has not radically changed recently.
The SV political and ideological climate is all about pidgeonholing you into 0.01-0.3% segment ('left-handed bisexual javascript expert'), then maintaining these segments and manipulating the fractured society into neoliberal directions.
It is obvious that there is nothing that can be named as a common interest in SV: there is no such discourse. The commonality is restricted to your 0.01-0.3% segment.
Any definition? I'm not from there, but if you use votes for liberal candidates as a basis, they are pretty liberal [0]. That's at least one definition, whether or not it's yours. I could understand arguing nuance, but to say it isn't pretty liberal by any definition appears incorrect.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee#Politics
Is that feeling of pushback to an (assumed) different viewpoint just that in the midwest, a conservative is in the majority, and in SF they're not? So, in one place you'd encounter almost no confident opposition, and in the other you would? I assume it might stand out and feel like suppression if you weren't at all used to it.
I think that's the whole point though. The article is saying that there is too much heat simply because they express their opposing viewpoints. "Stay out of the kitchen" means "close your mouth around Silicon Valley liberals" or you'll experience backlash.
While this may not be your personal experience, the article essentially says that the somewhat ironic message coming out of the Valley from people in the "party of tolerance" is that they tolerate everyone except those that have opposing viewpoints.
To go much further left, you have to enter Venezuela style Socialism. The GP openly advocates for changing essentially everything about the US political and economic system and shifting every area much further to the left ideologically (by much further, I mean it far surpasses what even "liberals" in Congress advocate for).
It has to do with the moral panic over intelligent people dissenting from The Narrative. This is a new and extremely illiberal phenomenon, and it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better.
No, it means don't expect to be able to say controversial stuff without people who disagree with you also having their say.
Czech and Poland are entirely different from France and Denmark when it comes to such. Germany and Switzerland are also far different from France.
There are at least a dozen nations in Europe with very aggressive hard right parties, often derived from former neo-Nazi parties, that have won a political seat at the table in the last decade. That trend is still continuing. Europe overall has a worse far right problem than the US does and it's getting worse at an alarming rate. Europe even has multiple fascist dictatorships, in Belarus, Turkey and Russia.
I wish that there were some sort of metamoderation system. I downvote the mods whenever they post about abusing their power, but I don't know if that even has an effect, or if moderators' posts are immune from downvotes.
You've not been around much of SV if you've not run into a libertarian, or an anarchocapitalist. Either that, or you've made the considerable error of confusing their values with "standard democratic talking points".
thus further proving the headline
No. That is the fault of mass media corporations (and now, also thinly-veiled "grassroots" organizations). It's quite simple to pick and choose quotes from individuals that can be construed as offensive ("superpredators", anyone? The list goes on), craft a narrative, and put them on the national stage. This is what these organizations do, at the expense of other issues. You will not find a more powerful, more influential reason for the division this country is experiencing. It is these organizations and those who profit from them the most that are most responsible.
Leftists aren't really bothered about whether the CEO or President is black or white or male or female or transgender, but by the fact that any single person is allowed the wield the power that a CEO or President can yield. Many of them also reject reformist politics.
Black Panther Party member Fred Hampton(As good an example of a "far-left" American figure as you can find) can probably explain it better:
> We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.
> We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.
> We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don't care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
A good rule of thumb is - Anything done by multi billion dollar corporations is probably not leftist.
People on the left strenuously objected to the invasion of Iraq as a criminal waste of human life, and for commentators on the right to say they were defending freedom (including the freedom to criticise their ongoing war) was a specious argument, to put it mildly.
It's interesting that you specifically choose "libertarian". While maybe technically further to the right than Republican it truly seems supporting specifically Republican candidates is wholly furiously unacceptable in the bay area -- especially at tech companies. Try wearing a pin, t-shirt, hat, etc... "openly" supporting Trump to a tech company in the city -- actually for the safety of your career and physical self better not.
I had no idea he was talking about this. How could anyone guess that. If true then he has failed to communicate so completely that I am inclined to ignore everything else.
If you have a coherent argument which embodies what "he meant to say" then let's hear it. Shifting the goalposts on past arguments, however, is not allowed.
Which reminds me of an interesting experience I had. I was living in NY, and took a trip that had me spend about 8 days each in SF and Cuba. It took me a couple days to put a name on a feeling I was experiencing in Havana. I realized that it was the dissonance of the staggering inequality plainly in the Union Square area of SF I was staying and the relative flat deprivation of Havana. The latter lacked the overtly utter destitution of the Tenderloin.
I didn't have any profound takeaways other than that it seemed like there should be some way of getting the benefits of American society, with the baseline of Cuban society, given how much more we have in resources.
Look, if you're going to speak at the RNC and actively support Trump, you will be on the opposite side of a super-majority of college-educated people in this country at this point. And definitely a large super-majority of people under 35, women, Asian Americans, Latinos and African Americans. So if you're surrounded by such people, and are loudly promoting such views, don't expect your interlocutors to not criticize them, or necessarily want to hear them ad nauseum.
The evidence however suggests that Mr. Thiel is certainly being given PLENTY of platforms to continue expressing his viewpoints in a respectful manner in front of influential crowds of people, including students. Who is pushing this whole narrative?
>This simplistic tribalistic nonsense is not how you run a society.
Ironically it seems like you two are being just as tribalistic as the people you complain about. Maybe something to think about.
He thinks it's hard to be a conservative in California? Try being a liberal in most of the red state parts of the country who actually has to work for a living.
Give me a break.
Adding this as an edit: Also, do you work in the Bay Area currently (you mentioned you grew up there)? There is a pretty substantial discrepancy between voicing political views in high school and college vs. when people actually start working. I have met more than an order of magnitude more conservatives and non-liberals in 4 years of university in the Bay Area as compared working in tech there - 25 to 30 in unviersity vs. exactly 1 in industry. Also edited in the fact that I work in the Bay Area in the first sentence, so I realized I didn't mention it until the last.
To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in:
- treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*) - believing in the science of climate change - believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders - believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay
Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
I don't see many people in SV culture claiming to value "diversity of thought". They value diversity of culture, races, sexual identities, etc. But not thought (unfortunately).
That said, other posters are 100% correct when they write that rural America is just as intolerant, only in the other direction. And you don't see many people moving to those areas and attacking their lack of thought diversity (probably because they'd get shunned, at best, or shot, at worst).
SF is an affluent city, with a homeless problem consisting of 5,000 people, and they're unwilling to fix it financially. They can afford to, and they refuse to. It's disgusting.
I'm sure, but the situation in California is objectively worse. 34 in 10,000 Californias are homeless, compared to 8 in 10,000 Texans. The California homeless population increased by 13.7% last year alone (+16,136 people), compared to a 1.8% increase in Texas (+426 people).
San Francisco does a particularly bad job at sheltering its homeless population though. Maybe its mild climate allows this, compared to cities like NYC or Boston or DC with harsher winters.
https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...
I understand that there are many people who voted for Trump, but that does not mean that the opinion is something that should be considered being in line with the norms of the free society and far past conservative viewpoint.
(Not in the sense that you have no right to your opinion, in the sense that person having that opinion loses the respect of others.)
At my last job, several employees openly supported Trump, and they didn't suffer any consequences.
You would not believe how fast I have gone from being treated like a darling to being torn to pieces by liberal ideologues, when it comes to light that I hold unapproved political views, that I do not snarkily put down people who believe in God, or that I had supported Trump.
I also think it is odd that we can see the flaws in everyone everywhere else, but the flaws in our own environ seem so hard to spot. I'm reminded of this in these times: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You might be right. I just don't know what to do about political discussion these days. The punchline is, in case you didn't see any other posts by me, is that I've never not been on the left.
In my defence I'll address a few points. The cannabis and DACA issues were not contemporaneous with the president's election, so exclude those. Trump promised, disingenuously, "bigger, better" healthcare. The Muslim thing was not known at the time. Actually, none of your points stick.
But I'll concede anyway. Yes, elections have real-world consequences. But the vibe I got from the comment I replied to - of valley girls crying into their pumpkin spice lattes - was valid. They were mourning their team losing. This is a deathly trap we fall into these days politics-wise. It's a team sport and you will never forsake "your" team. I picked up a few traces of that loyalty from your examples, btw.
> It's not exactly like their team lost the superbowl
I'd counter that it is exactly like their team lost, or won, the superbowl
Going through all that's required to get a green card and then have the government take that away from me as if it's nothing, and for such a stupid reason? I would cry too.
The norms you mention are obviously not where you think they are. I think you may be out of touch.
Equal representation of women and minorities in tech. Wage gap as a result of discrimination. Unlimited low skill immigration; immigration amnesty. Environmentalism, global climate change. Gay rights. Drug legalization, ending policies of mass incarceration.
Those topics all have overwhelming support in SV.
It's the same with Trump. Some voters - many millions of them - overlooked his many flaws and voted for him, for any of a variety of reasons. That doesn't automatically make them racists, bigots, sexists, idiots, or any of the other labels that liberals like to put on Trump voters. I'm not even endorsing a specific viewpoint here - I'm just saying that instantly ostracizing someone from their workplace social scene (if not their job altogether) based on one data point that by itself means next to nothing is wrong.
And other Americans have a very weird conception of what far-left is outside of America.
There are nations out there that are very, very conservative compared to the US. Republican talking points would be far-left in much of the world outside Western Europe, Canada and Australasia.
Trump, during the campaign, said he would immediately terminate DACA if elected, and also (by the end) had reversed his earlier position of leaving marijuana legalization up to the states, in favor of reinforcing prohibition. So, both were active issues in the election.
> Trump promised, disingenuously, "bigger, better" healthcare.
With no actual content except the repeal of the ACA.
> The Muslim thing was not known at the time
The Muslim ban was one of the earliest and most frequently repeated campaign promises, though the exact wording changed over time. It was not a policy preference that was out of the public awareness at the time of the election.
In TX, we'd call these people Republicans.
Can I find any more of your writing on this topic? I, and I'm sure many others, want to hear more.
Thiel has been around for a long time and his views have been given extensive consideration - I'd say he's a well known public figure out here on the west coast. It seems to me that people have listened to him and that a significant fraction have subsequently arrived at a negative conclusion about him.
I don't care very much but there are a ton of people out there afraid of being damore'd.
> People in Silicon Valley “openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified..."
> Sometimes Silicon Valley venture-capital investors and startup founders “have a certain way of thinking, and if you don’t fit into that way of thinking you’re not in the cool club”
are things that I can absolutely identify with. And I consider myself a moderate liberal, I can only imagine what mainstream conservatives are thinking.
You can be dismissed from leading a company today by privately supporting conservative causes. And there’s very little threat of a liberal CEO being dismissed independent of his private/public statements.
I have no desire to speak to any particular political subject in this forum; but it’s incredibly disingenuous to pretend this only happens to people who take public conservative positions.
Though even the charitable reading of your statement suggests that you believe that conservatives should stay in the closest. Which is a fascinating turn to say the least...
And, as a religious conservative guy in tech I’ll add my point of view: it’s okay to talk politics at work as long as you agree with everyone else. Those of us with dissenting world paradigms spend most of the day quietly wishing these conversations would end. Because there isn’t debate to be had at work; dissenting views are not welcome.
I'm hesitant to share anecdotes so I'll keep them fuzzy, but a few things I've seen are along the lines of places removing a comedic joke item because it /might/ give a newcomer the impression that the place "normalizes fascism" (rationale was fear someone wouldn't understand it's a joke and thus let's err on the side of keeping the space sterile), and hiring/comp policies designed around explicitly not paying men more than woman for the same role (everyone's the same role when your company doesn't have roles...) regardless of experience, performance, market, etc. at the expense of acquiring or retaining outstanding talent. And look what happened at Google...
It all comes from good intentions, but IMO it really just misses the mark and reduces an otherwise complex and human landscape to arbitrary statistics and n=1 anecdotes. There is very little intellectual rigor, or proven methodology and a lot of pandering to the political atmosphere (and this happens at places juggling millions of dollars of investor capital). On top of that, I don't understand why the office needs to be the place to explore these issues. If there are objectively systemic issues and discrepancies between e.g. genders in the US today that need correction, then we need to solve those with government policy and social activism. And if our society and our system of government does not respond, perhaps you just have to grow up realize that despite your self-endowed intellectual infallibility, some other people disagree and you might be barking up the wrong tree. Or, don't concede and keep fighting for justice, but don't bring it to work because you're too impatient or lack the perseverance to see your issue through at local, state, and national levels.
So even if other areas might have (for the sake of the argument), on average, more jerks that just don't get it or have a few things to learn about being inclusive and respectful in the way they conduct their daily lives, people don't build operational business policies around solving the perceived problems or shortcomings (not saying HR departments can't lay ground rules, but I'm talking about operational strategies). And that's the difference between an office in SF and an office in NYC or Boston, or Austin, etc.
I would not be surprised if the fact that people find some of Thiel's politics to be unfavorable is impacting his ability to function professionally in the Bay Area. When people's professional livelihood is at steak, of course they will gravitate towards communities where they are not otherwise encumbered. In the case of Thiel, money seems less of an issue, so I suspect he's also making a social statement about the state of affairs down by the bay. Celebrate or listen, but I hope you choose to listen because talent and money are all SV has got going for it, and if those things leave you can kiss the glory days goodbye.
/2cents
That really has nothing to do with Silicon Valley specifically, Trump supporter has become a bad word in many big cities that Bush supporter never was.
- Rejection of capitalism and private property
- Opposition to all forms of social hierarchy
- Rejection of electoral and reformist politics
- Revolutionary, often militant program
- Explicitly communist or anarchist in nature
I also agree that tech companies can be a difficult place for constructive political debate (or even agree-to-disagree conversations), and I do not think this is a good thing.
Last I checked it was only slightly more than half the eligible voting population that actually voted in the presidential election.
Popularity is quite orthogonal to controversy regardless. Our current president is controversial, and it can be argued that controversy is the very thing responsible for the votes he received.
This is false equivalence. People like Clinton might appear corrupt for republicans and Dick Cheney might be horrible for democrats, but Trump is in completely different plane.
>workplace social scene (if not their job altogether) based on one data point that by itself means next to nothing is wrong.
What you think is the threshold where political opinion can become personal? When your family is deported?
I was recently invited to an afternoon of board games at the residence of a wealth San Franciscan. I was invited to step over a homeless man at the entrance. I refused. My behaviour was surprising/comical to my host. This isn’t a problem of geographic isolation. Empathetic circles have contracted, and that is bad.
With hardly any senior elected officials even at the municipal level. Like many fringe parties, it is just about big enough to qualify for public election financing but not to be competitive in any races that matter.
And you know, Roy Moore lost elections. How many Republicans did SFBA send to Washington lately?
Silicon Valley has always been different from the rest of the U.S. The "H.P. way" was in its time a radical and progressive thing.
Because you should be "fearing your ass off" when people are afraid to express their legitimate political views. This has all happened before and it wasn't pretty.
update: come on downvoters. At least give me a clue.
Both sides are seemingly entirely incapable of accepting that people, with all their complexities can have differing view points and not just assuming they are the devil incarnate.
I used to think that I was pretty far-left leaning, but recently, with the attitudes of the so-called progressives, I honestly want nothing to do with these people. How is it that more people aren't terrified that the left has turned themselves into an echo-chamber so against even slightly differing ideals that those who do even slightly go against the norm will have a social-media storm come down upon them to ruin their career and life.
And don't think conservatives are any better. Here is a hot tip for all the conservatives out there - white supremacy and neo-nazi's are not the types of people you want to associate yourselves with. The fact that it's been over 70 years since the end of WW2 and you haven't quite figured that out yet is almost as baffling as the idea that conservatives cannot accept that gun-control does not mean people want to take your guns away, but simply want to make sure that people who would abuse guns can not get them.
Honestly, if the lot of you could start acting like mature adults who can have a reasonable discussion of actual issues without resorting to calling each other names and organizing mobs, the rest of the world that still follow America's example would be thankful.
I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider.
It has little to do with politics, and it has more to do with the role of technology in human life and the future.
Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.
I used to be into that, believing that software was this wonderful force that is going to turn man from the ape he is into some kind of artificially-intelligent hyper-being. It's a fail, it's a fantasy. It's just not going to happen, and it's time to wake up from the dream. We're not going to be living on Mars or visit Jupiter or become immortal, not in the next 10 years or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. With high probability you're going to live out your life and die somewhere between 70 and 100. Just like the billions of humans before you. Get used to it! It's OK, even.
I moved away to get out of the shouting match, to get away from so many young bright software developers like me straight out of college, who just want to disrupt everything for no reason, and to get out of that echo chamber. Everyone's a unicorn. Everyone's gonna change the world. FFS your stupid chat apps are not going to change the world.
Moving out of the Bay Area is not about being disillusioned, it's about focusing on things that actually matter, instead of the silly bubble.
In my view, exactly what happened is that a generation of feminists used the internet (esp. blogs and social media) very effectively. You can look to gaming culture, not as a primary source of this necessarily, but at least as a convenient observable thermometer and timeline. Again, I don't mean to suggest that gaming was the source of all this, but you can watch the dissemination of the ideas, and the predominating cultural shift, by reviewing the timelines of the Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy (2010-11), and GamerGate (2014). A more direct connection is that the central figures in GamerGate did in fact offer anti-harassment consulting services to SV technology companies.
> Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.
I can definitely identify with this sentiment.
If this were actually true of the current milieu of tech employment in the bay area, I'd likely still be a willing and active participant in that workforce.
Substantial energy is wasted discussing ideologies and arranging/having meetings on what are fundamentally social issues we're not realistically fixing in the short-term at the workplace from the bottom-up. The reasons appeared largely focused on satisfying the expectations of a vocal minority of SJW-types bringing this crap into the workplace with HR departments jumping at the opportunity to appear busy and influential.
Edit: Maybe my experiences were unique, though my social circles were complaining of similar things at their respective startups.
Uh, that's not my impression. My impression is that the pro-Damore posters say he should not have been fired for the views he expressed. And they're not the dominant opinion; rather it seems neither the pro- or anti-Damore opinions are dominant.
SF: $11,600
DC: $11,000
NYC: $9,800
Seattle: $7,950
Portland: $7,454
Austin: $4,114
Chicago: $3,626
Philly: $2,810
Dallas: $2,367
LA: $2,313
Columbus: $1,035
Until people start actually voting for (a) third party, I am afraid that rather than being a last squeeze, we will be getting candidates like this more often, not less.
I think people like this were ironically and unwittingly recruiting people to the other side. Which is unfortunate.
I spent 6 years on the street. I blog about homelessness and have done at least a little paid writing on the subject. My blog and other online activities keep me in touch with homeless people. I have also been interviewed by reporters because of my homeless blog.
I firmly believe that climate is a major factor in the high levels of homelessness in SF. This plus insane housing prices become a recipe for intractable homelessness.
Some homeless travel to places like SF in part for the good weather, in part because big cities have more services for the homeless. Then once they are there, they can't afford to get into housing and leaving to go someplace cheaper is both expensive and time consuming.
I suspect SF just feels overwhelmed by events. The only real solution here would be to get housing prices under control. People don't know how on earth to solve that issue for more middle class individuals in SF. The idea of solving it for the seriously poor is just too much to even contemplate.
I am not excusing it. I appreciate you refusing to step over a homeless individual. But one of the problems is that most people talking about this issue talk about The Homeless as if this is primarily a people problem and not a housing issue. It becomes a psychological barrier to the ability to imagine making real progress. So, like the relatives of addicts get inured to it and quit trying, I think SF is getting numbed to the problem because it seems simply unsolvable.
I'm having a really hard time taking this at face value.
valley girls crying into their pumpkin spice lattes
'Valley girls' refers to the San Fernando valley in Southern California, as (stereotypically) depicted on TV shows like 'The OC' - shallow fashionistas primarily concerned with gossip and social status. It's specifically a Southern California Thing and has never ever been associated with Silicon Valley.
Perhaps your social observation skills aren't as keen as you imagine them to be?
It's hard to reply to justice warrior-talk without being incredibly condescending. Can you slow down for one minute and define what you mean by 'equality of all people'?
We have 2 genders, not 1, might be a good starting point.
Let's follow that up with how you know what all people want out of life, that you want them liberated from systems of whatever? Or you're interested in doing for people, what they don't want done to them? How does that work with liberating them from oppression exactly?
The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and has hundreds of employees. In my experience I didn't notice a single situation in which their conservative views had negative impacts on the company. In fact I think their conservative background helped the company raise money from VCs, who I'd wager are more conservative than average.
The thing about Trump is that the moderate left and even many from the moderate right (my uncle never voted for a democrat until 2016) are mostly disgusted with the guy. It isn’t really about politics as it is about human decency against sexism, racism, and so on.
But even if you're well fed and feel secure in your future economic prospects, not caring very much about racism and sexism doesn't make you racist or sexist. It seems to me that most Republicans just don't care about those two things nearly as much as they care about other things. If you're surrounded by only white people, racism becomes a very abstract concept, vs if you live in a large multicultural city.
As a party, Democrats really need to start working on understanding the people who don't vote for them, rather than just assuming they're just insane bigots and insulting them as such in the process.
The actual people are not much different than anywhere else in the US. But they quickly learn to provide lip service to the official ideology, especially when seeking employment or acceptance in social media-mediated groups (and there are very few that are not.)
The real problem with computer techies is that they tend to be more sycophantic to the prevailing power than other profesions.
Today there are so many source of information that you are never really forced to dive deeper into something. If you see something repeated enough you get a very strong sense of it being true. Many fringe opinions spread without people realizing that they are just that. They aren't used to people disagreeing with them so when people do so strongly they feel alienated.
In regards to Thiel moving, and other VCs praising China, I think that has more to do with people in general becoming more skeptical about SV. Which is a bad thing if you are a VC and are selling "disruption", but probably a good thing for engineers.
Even if you start with the premise that no laws explicitly target any race/gender/etc, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone is treated equally under the law.
What gets you in trouble here is talking about pro-life family values, personal responsibility, and how marginalized groups who are over/under represented in certain outcomes must deserve it.
Consider though that one thing the alt-right will never accept is that racial diversity in the workplace is a net positive in itself. Whether it's true or false, it's just apart of the parcel.
Now how would someone like that feel comfortable in a workplace that tells you that being against racial diversity is racist? You don't even have to bring up your opinions, it's beamed to you on a regular basis through meetings, announcements and slack conversations.
I personally had a similar experience recently at my job in Australia in relation to the vote on gay marriage. Even though I am myself gay and have a boyfriend, I was in favour of a plebiscite.
This was in complete opposition to rest of the company, who went so far as to joint write a letter with other companies demanding the government not allow a plebiscite and to instead just pass gay marriage without a public vote.
There was alot of implication around that anyone who disagreed wanted the vote for a chance to vote no and more importantly, to allow for an advertising campaign against gays to intimidate the community as a whole.
People made the claim around myself that obvious the reason people want the plebecide is because they are homophobic racist rednecks.
I don't know maybe i'm just rambling at this point but It's just not nice to work in an environment where you have to listen to people trash your character based on your beliefs and you can't say anything otherwise your "discussing politics" and "rocking the boat".
-financial compensation for housework/child-rearing -reduced hours for the primary caregiver at the same level of salary after childbirth (usually the woman) -equal pay for women mandated by law (pass the ERA) -much stronger policies against sexual harassment -more women in positions of power -full subsidy for menstruation products & birth control -paid maternity leave for all workers -universal healthcare -comprehensive sex positive and consent focused sex education in public schools
I could go on, but the main point is men & male society control politics, science, the economy, etc, so the whole society is predominantly oriented around men. A lot of shifts are more cultural (like attitudes towards harassment and sexism) which is harder to make into concrete policy proposals.
Maybe I'm biased because not being in the US most of my knowledge about it is from HN links and discussions along with a few other blog posts here and there but: if that were true, we wouldn't be seeing "but mah inclusion!" posts and discussions on/about American startups every single day around here.
Exit out of vim, fire up Visual Studio Code, and start writing some Javascript. At this point, the 20-somethings will hoist your chair atop their shoulders and carry you around the office chanting your name.
If someone is using "intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself" as an insult, it only makes sense to assume they are claiming that they are different.
The most amazing cultural thing in SF that blew my mind was the existence of startup scene as a cultural phenomenon, subculture and lifestyle.
I'm not completely sure if this is cultural misunderstanding and I am missing something, but it seemed like for every real young entrepreneur there was ten dreamers who were just hanging in the scene for vibes. Dropping out from collage "to startup" but spending their time just hanging out with the group of people with the same subculture. It seemed like pitching a startup was a hobby and maybe phase in life just like sabbatical year.
I find it utterly fascinating. I have no idea if it has negative effects or if it's completely positive phenomenon. Clearly there is lots of young energy in the air.
You could find some plank of Trump's platform -- deregulation, for instance -- to be crucially important, and consider the rest of it to be pretty boring and less consequential.
You could consider him a moderate stopgap against [insert unhappy statement about Democratic agenda here].
There are plenty of innocent reasons why one might support Donald Trump.
(I voted against him, for what it's worth.)
The endgame hopefully is that intellectually dishonest strategies from all sides become discredited.
Also, the point is not that less conservatives are in tech companies is the issue. I am under no illusion that probably no more than 10-15% of SV tech workers are going to be conservative. This is well within my personal estimate judging from people I met in university (during which they were more open about their political leanings) who went on to go into tech. It's that the conservatives that are (and even centrists and less-extreme liberals) feel the need to put on a facade while at work and that the political environment has become isolated to the extent that even mainstream conservative and even centrist views are considered abjectly racist or wrong.
I'd consider an office with 5% conservatives where those conservatives feel empowered to share their opinion to be a better working environment, as compared to an office with 25% conservatives where all those conservatives put on a facade of liberalism out of fear of repercussion.
- Treat all people equally, and legislate that outcomes are the same for all groups of people
- Believe in the science of climate change and legislate reductions programs which incentivize offshoring manufacturing (but don't put any constraints on global trade)
- Mass murders are caused by guns and that outweighs all advantages of civilian gun ownership, and there's no other way to solve the problem, so it should be banned
- The more you earn, the more tax you should pay, so if your economic output is really high you should hide your money in other countries and signal your virtue on other fronts so people forgive you for being a tax cheat
That made me stop and think. I'm trying to imagine a picture of someone who is against racial diversity but isn't remotely racist and whilst I agree there's no logical contradiction inherent in that position I do struggle to think of a realistic portrait of such an individual.
I might be missing something here but can you spell out this position for me in a bit more detail? I'm genuinely interested as I wonder if my definition of "racist" or my definition of "against racial diversity" might be different to yours.
Admittedly, I don't even like the term "conservative", like Naval would say, pinning labels onto yourself only forces you into static positions that you end up having to defend, even if you don't 100% buy into them.
I simply happen to have certain stances and ideas that are in opposition to the mainstream thought of SV. As much as I'd love to discuss them, potentially learning more about them myself and (gasp!) even changing my mind in the process, I'm not comfortable doing it. There's a high chance I will be immediately labeled as "racist / sexist / bigot / white supremacist / [fill in the blank]" for even contemplating disagreement on these topics (let's take "diversity" or how we're handling it as a society as an example) without any supporting evidence.
Unfortunately, as of today, bigoteering has 0% burden on the person making the accusation and 100% of the weight put on the accused. It's always safe to call someone a witch, but proving them wrong in one's defense is nigh impossible.
Ironically, the most open minded and considerate conversations about diversity that I've ever had were with black coworkers. I've learned plenty from them, changed my stance several times, realized I didn't know that much before.
The worst were almost always with overrepresented majorities who were "stepping in to speak up for their less-advantaged brethren". I've never learned anything from them on the topics they were so zealous about. It's the diversity version of "white knighting".
It's hard not to become jaded and assume that most people in this latter category don't actually care, and just want to establish themselves at the top of the moral hierarchy through vacuous virtue signaling. It's disappointing.
S.F. and California as a whole has also been a crucible of multiculturalism and socioeconomic tension since missionaries first accosted the natives, redefining itself with each wave of arrivals including fur trappers, ranchers, farmers, prospectors and Chinese laborers of the gold rush and railroad age, the Okies of the depression, and black and hispanic laborers for WWII. The city has also been a west coast stronghold of finance, lawyers, and corporatism at least since the gold rush era started creating locally concentrated wealth. These forces have shaped and continue to shape both politics and popular culture.
To a first order, what is happening in S.F. or S.V. within the blindered tech employee sphere is much the same. Local experience is warped by the continued influx of youngsters from outside. We have been having an endless September far longer than the internet's version. They dilute and revise popular culture as much or more than they are themselves inculturated.
A longer term economic trend has been the wind-down of military bases and defense-related manufacturing in the S.F. Bay Area. This has affected economic immigration into the region by removing one large source of conservative outsiders (those young ex-military folk with tech training and a new-found awareness of the local economy) and also a selection of jobs funded by military contracts and including hands-on engineering and industrial tasks. Meanwhile, the dreamers continue to immigrate on their own, much like youth flock to Los Angeles with dreams of the entertainment industry.
This alienating, pod-people replacement process ought to seem like it is accelerating right now partly due to simple demographics. There are more youngsters to flow in as part of a general pulse of young people in America, compared to the dip in the population curve we experienced through Gen X around the first dot-com cycle. In almost every context, young people in their 20s are more liberal, more naive, more idealistic, and more outspoken about their opinions. Having more such people at once is very visible, just like it was in the 1960s with the boomers.
I wonder how the vanguard of the 60s felt when they started to hear that they were "too old" to be trusted by the growing wave of hippies and yippies.
I think there's several claims here:
1) "no/very few women can be good at stem/math/language/programming." Nobody but the most comically self-parodying misogynists says that.
2) "fewer women are good at stem/math/language/programming than men." This is the "SV conservative/classic liberal" position. If equal opportunity is provided, any remaining differences in hiring are plausibly down to availability which is down to average capability.
3) "women and men are just as good at stem/math/language/programming." This is the progressive/feminist position.
The people who hold 3 want the rest of the world to think that the people who hold 2 actually hold 1. Many 2 would be willing to tentatively jump on board with 3, but 3 somehow keep antagonizing them. As such, similarly to the Trump election, it's politically a question of which side disgusts you less.
I've never seen much opposition to your run off the mill conservatism you find anywhere in the business world.
I think most people here could see that not going over well. Would we then think of china and japan as mostly racist?
I don't really want to get into racist/racial debate on HN, other than to say it's not some tiny opinion only held by white supremacists and neo-nazis.
That and you will find if you look into the research on race differences (eg: genetic influences on IQ) that these topics are not even close to be declared settled and are still hotly contested.
Can we please stop it with these political comments made to provoke instead of discuss? If you want to vent your anger go post on reddit.
However, this isn’t actually the issue - the issue is that the (relatively small) population of conservative-leaning (or just not-entirely-liberal) people in SV and elsewhere cannot expect to speak their minds and also keep their careers. Even relatively milquetoast, vaguely conservative people like Brendan Eich are (evidently) at serious risk.
Like many other commenters in this thread, you choose a wording that would be more appropriate if the extent of the problem were obnoxious Republicans not getting invited to happy hour/their coworkers' birthday party/?. The type of situation that people complain about, whether it is accurate or not, seems to be more along the lines that if you are in the wrong half of Silicon Valley companies, being recognised as deviating from the obnoxious Democrat position on any issue of import may result in your colleagues organising to report you to HR and/or rile up a small city's worth of Twitter users to call for your company to terminate you or be boycotted itself, not to mention potential long-term consequences along the lines of easily googleable Medium articles with your name on them or entries in an unknown number of blacklists circulated to recruiters through activist backchannels. How accurate or common any of these are is completely up to discussion, but dismissing them as if any of what is alleged amounts to a normal and healthy free speech reaction just seems disingenuous.
Edit: you're right about account karma. When it gets negative enough, comments get killed by software, which is close enough to shadowbanning that it would look the same externally. That case is rather rare and I forgot about it.
Thankfully, most people there don't talk about politics. Maybe 5% of the population are constantly bringing it up though, rarely in direct work functions, but in any other message board or forum.
Ah the SJW boogyman. A quick way to get anybody with a functioning brain to dismiss everything you say.
I regularly see a lot of different views and values, both online and in the streets. I agree the most common is what I think of as "moneyed Democrat", meaning pro-status-quo left, what in other countries would be either center-left or center-right. But I hear a lot from socialists, communists, anarchists, libertarians, and what I think of as fundamentalist capitalists. And I know plenty of people who are, like myself, socially liberal, fiscally conservative independents that in another era probably would have been Rockefeller Republicans.
The only thing I really don't see much of here is modern Republicans. Which I get, in that a lot of the modern Republican talking points are anti-tolerance (e.g., anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-nonwhite-immigrant), anti-science (e.g., evolution, climate change), pro-corporate, and/or pro-authoritarian. And given the way the CA Republican Party self-destructed over the last few decades, the lack just seems unsurprising.
There is no tolerance paradox. For example, people's ability to advocate for the repeal of the 1st Amendment is protected by the 1st Amendment. Allowing people to advocate for the removal of the 1st Amendment, despite being a massively unpopular position (I hope), is an act of tolerance. What is not correct is attempting to claim that it is an act of tolerance to harass or shut down those people advocating for the Amendment's repeal because people believe it would lead to a worse society.
The folks I'm mostly talking about don't actually believe in that, so obviously my "they" was too broad, indeed.
> Someone from a minority might well have had an better life with more opportunities than someone from a privileged class.
I don't think this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, except maybe as an intentional deflection? We're talking about white resentment as a phenomenon, not Bill the blue collar veteran who was tricked into plundering loot for Halliburton in 2004 or something.
> Comparing groups does not translate into comparing individuals (interestingly this is the same intellectual shortcut that leads to racism)
Discussing race as a phenomenon doesn't make you racist, and this talking point is often used by alt-righters to make some sort of "actually, anti-racists are the REAL racists" narrative. I don't buy it.
edit: My views are failing in the marketplace of ideas! Feel free to leave a comment if you want to engage.
Our legal system is fragile and it's not at all clear that trans rights will win the day.
And I also do realize that one is simply not allowed to be openly destitute in a place like Havana, as it would discredit The System. By the same token, I think we kind of discredit our own.
He has to put up with people thinking he is an asshole. We the proletariat have to put up with the people he can buy into power, which affects our livelihood, health, the future of our society. If I had the money to sue him out of existence, as he is wont to do to others, I would.
Fuck him.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california-preside...
For example, look at the US right's decades-long pursuit of anti-GLBTQ policies. Gay people mostly just want to be left alone to live their lives. the US right wants to use the power of the state to discriminate against them. It went so far in California that Prop 8 specifically rewrote the constitution to strip the right of equal protection from gay people.
That is intolerance.
Also, "social lynching" is just a ridiculous term. The US has a long history of actual lynching, which is the extrajudicial murder by hanging, mainly carried out by intolerant racists. What you apparently mean by "social lynching" is people exercising their freedoms of speech and association by critcizing or not being around people whose ideas and behaviors they think harmful to other people.
As first-amendment champion Ken White, aka Popehat, often points out, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. "Speech has consequences. Among those consequences are condemnation, vituperation, scorn, ridicule, and pariah status. Those consequences represent other people exercising their free speech rights. That's a feature of the marketplace of ideas, not a bug."
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...
Or his education department? For something that isn't a priority, his Administration is acting strongly, broadly, and consistently on rolling back trans protections.
That's what it sounds like to me too. I find it particularly hard to reconcile claims of liberalism, or even libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.
That is, you know. One of those norms. A rather important one, too.
Do we really think Trump's candidacy and presidency would've been well received by the west coast in 2012/2013 instead of 2016/2017?
I don't think so. Just about everything he said that's been treated as wildly offensive and uninformed the last couple of years would've been no more well-received four years earlier.
Heck, you don't even have to be on the left to believe that rejecting white nationalism is why California turned blue in the first place: https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-...
I think those on the right who don't reject Trump should reflect on how he's changed the Republican party.
>definitely a large super-majority
Don't use phrases like this without defining them in concrete terms and providing stats. If 1/3 of the people supported Trump in those categories, opposition could easily be counted as a super majority but that would significantly weaken your case. Ignoring and belittling the views of 1/3 of your group is not really acceptable in other contexts.
Actually yes. I don't think that's far-fetched by our standards. And on the whole I'm quite proud of the distance we in the West have travelled on this issue.
However - the reason we're where we are is because slavery, colonialism and immigration have rather forced us to confront the issue in a way that other nations have not needed to.
Nearly everyone from Silicon Valley that's progressive/liberal thinks there's no problem or that the problem is something else.
Nearly everyone not fitting the description above thinks there's a problem and that it alienates them.
The parent comment is asking why the idea of equal opportunity is seen as far left. I am trying to explain that everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities, and explain that the debate has now become about whether we enforce/regulate the distribution of wealth and jobs such that society ends up statistically "equal". And that this is a very controversial and political topic and has nothing to do with racism despite the rhetoric employed at both extremes of the horseshoe.
However, for conservatives it's an open question of whether they really are underrepresented or they seem underrepresented because they're hiding their viewpoint.
Perhaps a more useful parallel would be sexual orientation a couple decades ago, where there used to be all kinds of policies like "don't ask, don't tell" and you might have gotten an impression that your company or industry has very few gay people while in fact they're there just hiding in the closet.
However, "social lynching" is not an absurd term. While everyone has a right to express their opinion and face the consequences thereof, social lynching occurs when people mob together and demand, pressure, or otherwise effectively execute physical consequences for a utterance of speech that is otherwise entirely legal and often totally unrelated to the consequences. Losing your job because a group of people found out you donated to a conservative social/political group is an example of social lynching (in this context). No, they didn't kill the person, but there is a real impact on that person's lively hood and it can often mean the death of a career. I agree that speech is not consequence free, let the assholes be shamed, but when we start to cross realms and impact people's jobs, families, lively hoods, for simply holding other opinions, something else is happening. We're beyond the realm of speech and have entered the wold of actions.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
More to the point, even if you were correct about their racial homogeneity that would not be a model that the United States can or should seek to emulate.
However, the fact that people even think to place tolerance of conservative views on the same level as planning homicide is ridiculous. Advocating that country raise the minimum salary for H1Bs, wearing a Trump hat (when your co-workers are wearing Hilary gear), advocating for stronger border enforcement, etc. are nowhere near the levels of abject illegality as plotting a murder. The notion that these are even comparable is testament to how much of an echo chamber tech in Silicon Valley has become.
It's not leftism so much as people who are committed to political orthodoxy versus people who don't care about it. Trump eschewed political orthodoxy, and still got elected, and that was very scary for a lot of people. (In contrast, I lean left, but come from a country where bombs go off after one side loses an election, so I found it very hard to get worked up about Trump.)
EDIT: Jokes aside, I simply do not talk about political affiliations with anyone, whatsoever. I have no problem having a little back and forth regarding an issue here or an issue there as well as discussing heavier subjects such as foreign policy. To be honest, I do find myself policing my language to not give away who I may or may not have voted for in the past every now and then.
I should probably note I live outside of the US and talking politics can really mess with everyday relationships. I made a decision to vote only on issues while trying to abstain from the whole "this is my sports team" mentality which sort of takes hold of people where I live.
When you vote for someone who appears to be corrupt, don't be surprised when you're thought to be corrupt.
When you vote for someone who appears to be rich, don't be surprised when you're thought to be rich.
When you vote for someone who appears to take a lot of money from Saudi Arabia, don't be surprised when you're thought to take a lot of money from Saudi Arabia.
Are you starting to see how childish that logic is?
www.thumbtack.com/
In USA, the nation is mixed, heterogenous, and thus being anti-diversity unavoidably involves some discrimination of your fellow citizens, being an asshole to some groups of them; and justifying this discrimination tends to require some racist arguments.
In homogenous countries like Japan, the issue is different - you can easily consider other races/ethnicities as equally good/valid/etc while at the same time being anti-diversity, favoring near-zero permanent immigration; i.e. a simple status quo position "the other races are nice, let's visit, chat, trade, exchange experiences but let us stay here and let them stay there" is feasible, unlike USA.
In USA, acknowledging "there's us and there's them" race separation divides the country, in Japan the same thing can unite it. Treating members of another race as guests that are different/separate from your group is reasonable in homogeous nations and horrid in "melting pot" nations.
* That affirmative action should be illegal or more heavily restricted.
* That unlawful residents should be removed from the country, even if previous administrations chose not to enforce immigration law.
* That welfare programs should be cut back.
* That taxes should be reduced, even if they're reduced in such a way that the wealthy receive a greater tax cut than the non-wealthy.
* That restrictions on firearms purchases and ownership should be kept permissive, and that restrictive local laws (e.g. California's) are unlawful.
* That the US should be more restrictive in allowing foreigners to work in the country (e.g. raising the minimum salary for H1B workers)
* That inequalities in education, employment, and achievement should not be presumed to be indications of bias.
These are just quick examples. Personally, I advise anyone to conceal their political leanings if they agree with any of these statements in my current workplace if they wish to preserve their career prospects, and I think that's a shame. All of these are things that half to 30% of the voting population believes in, and are on the core platform of one of the two major US parties. Any workplace that claims to tolerate conservative views should tolerate these statements.
"Conservative", "liberal", "centrist", etc. are by no means monolithic attributes. I think these labels are better described as broad generalizations of individual positions on issues. For example, I agree with 70-80% of "liberal" positions (maybe closer to 60% if you include San Francisco local issues, but there's arguments to be made that's more "far-left" vs. "left" than liberal vs. conservative). I still consider myself a liberal. That said, I still do censor myself on any non-anonymous forums for the remaining 20-30%.
In over two decades of work in corporate as well as entrepreneurial environments, I've not seen a difference in efficacy within groups that would be attributed to being either racially diverse or non-diverse.
For example, if there were three groups working on a given technical project, one composed of all white men, one composed of all Asian women, and one composed of a mix of race and gender, would the diverse group produce a superior result? My experience is that they would not. Sufficiently and equally incentivized and qualified, all groups would likely produce similar results.
So, I'd consider myself as somebody who's "against racial diversity" mainly because I haven't experienced it improving the core competencies of my company -- which is what I care about. Nor have I found compelling research supporting higher performance by more diverse groups. Thus, efforts to improve diversity, for diversity's sake, in my experience, feels like an effort to make a change that's not related, and might even be a distraction, to making my company more effective.
One way I see this working is a person who believes in individualistic meritocracy with libertarian leanings. In this post I'll try to lay out the point of view of hypothetical person (so not everything I say here represents my own personal beliefs or something I personally agree with).
First, the meritocracy part: Such a person would say that all workplace decisions should be made on a totally race-blind basis: "I don't care what race the people at my startup are, what matters is if they can code (if that's what their job title entails)." If it so happens that our society has relatively few people of X race who can code at the required skill level, then as an inevitable consequence on average startups will employ few people of race X, because there simply aren't enough skilled programmers of race X to go around.
Second, the libertarian part: Sure, it's indisputable that there are a ton of social and economic issues that people of race X encounter at home, in their communities, in school, that end up causing fewer young adults of race X to be coders. But it's certainly not this startup's job to try to fix the upbringing of employees that has resulted in their inadequacy to supply the needed labor. This startup's job is more along the lines of, if a person can't do the work the company needs them to do, they shouldn't be working here.
It's not even the government's job to fix this. When it tries, it only succeeds at wasting resources, turning the people it's trying to help into permanent dependents of the taxpayers, and poisoning the reputation of the actual high achievers of race X because everyone who sees them now assumes "Oh, he/she can't possibly actually be able to do his/her job, the only reason he/she's in that position is there's a quota of minorities to fill so the company doesn't get called out / boycotted / sued for insufficient diversity..."
Third, the individualistic part: Do we really want a society based on the group identities of different races? That seems like a recipe for perpetuating our race problems, not fixing them. If you enshrine "racial diversity" into any kind of official or quasi-official policy, then by definition the policy is treating under-represented races favorably and over-represented races unfavorably.
I mean if xenophobic is defined as preferring your own race compared to others then I guess pretty much the entire world is xenophobic except white liberals in western countries.
China or Japan doesn't (in recent decades at least) put nearly the same amount of effort into destabilizing other countries that they have no cultural affinity with compared to countries like the US.
To me, I would consider these actions more "racist" or "xenophobic" than restricting immigration to prevent excessive racial/cultural diversity. To me this is the rise and fall of nation states 101. More diversity in race and cultures leads to more conflict. You can't have a race riots between two races that don't live in the same nation.
To take this a bit away from race, just look at the middle east. Countries like iraq are doomed constant civil war because of the racial/cultural lines which are commonly expressed through religion sects. I think it would be pretty fair to say that without diversity, iraq as a nation would be much more stable and prosperous.
If it's xenophobic to understand race exists and the human condition is one that accepts race at a foundational level, then I guess we are all born Xenophobic. I personally don't believe in living by original sins.
you will and should face ostracism and other consequences for saying, believing, and doing things that people find abhorrent or evil. free speech means you're free to believe those things, and everybody else is free to call you evil, and coordinate accordingly.
conservatism in the United States has enabled the murder of countless children, both through the NRA's fanaticism re assault weapons, and through the weird effective impunity police have re criminal prosecution, even after killing children. conservatism in the US has enabled the destruction of the environment. the Trump campaign and presidency have seen a rapid escalation of hate crimes, and after Charlottesville the president explicitly defended the white supremacists in attendance.
there is so much blood on the hands of the conservative movement. so much racism. so much sexism. so much fear-mongering and rabble-rousing. how could you possibly expect to do that kind of thing without facing CRITICISM? how could you possibly be the victims here?
If it's implausible for someone to imagine expressing their beliefs without being labelled a bigot then it's just as much a statement about the environment they're in as it is about the beliefs in question.
Anything older than two years has disappeared into a vortex. I mean I remember when the peninsula was the center of the tech industry - I mean Facebook came out of Palo Alto in 2004, it wasn't that long ago. Now the peninsula is the home of Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and other dinosaurs founded between the 1960s and 1980s, and now Facebook is considered a dinosaur next to upstarts like Snapchat.
People travel from Market Street to their startup office. Everyone has a Macbook. Everything is done on Slack. Food is delivered to the communal tables at 1 PM via one of the dozens of online services that exist that make startup life simpler. If your laptop is HP, if you actually send e-mails from time to time, if you still use IRC and Freenode (or heaven forbid, EFnet) - dinosaur.
I've been on the Internet since the 1980s. One reason for lacking techno-utopianism is I see what has happened. I see how Verizon/AT&T the monopolies seized control of what I guess they always controlled on some level. I see how they destroyed Usenet. I see the NSA monitoring what Americans are doing 24/7/365, and storing it forever in a Utah data center they are still building. I see intelligent conversations between academics fade away for alt-right 4chan "raids". There was always some dull-headed and anarchic forces on the net but now they have taken over. I see the collaboration and massive amount of free man-hours given to build the net being seized and expropriated by large corporations. I see people burned out with 80/90 hour week startup death marches, then get burned on options for Zynga/Skype option clawbacks, then have their marriages and families and lives fall apart - 40/50 something unemployable burnouts with broken families. While the VCs and bigcorp majority stockholders make out like bandits.
It is one reason experienced people are shunted aside - it is easier to sucker some kid in their 20s to throw a decade away slaving for peanuts for super angels, VCs and their LPs. All the while having the founders talking about the importance of company culture, as if you're in some cult - which on some level - you are.
It's simply a cheap tactic that is used in an attempt to de-legitimize opposing viewpoints and end conversations.
Rand wrote; "It is precisely those ends ([sacrifice]-collectivism-statism) that ought to be rejected. But if neither party chooses to do it, the logic of events created by their common basic principles will keep dragging them both further and further to the left. If and when the "conservatives" are kicked out of the game altogether, the same conflict will continue between the "liberals" and the avowed socialists; when the socialists win, the conflict will continue between the socialists and the communists; when the communists win, the ultimate goal of [sacrifice] will be achieved; universal immolation."
In short we are witnessing the end of the Rep party as they are kicked off the social/political stage because they stand for nothing except watered-down ideas/goals of the Dems/Left. Who needs them?
Trump was never a Rep and used the Rep party for a self-aggrandizement, and big FU "Ill show you" to the NY Dems who rebuffed Trump in the '90s when he wanted leadership positions for all the money he was donating.
What Thiel, et. al. don't understand is that they are objecting to the left/liberal Establishment propagated by Academia and based on collectivism/sacrifice as political and moral ideals shared by both parties. The only way to end this process is for Thiel or the Reps to stand up for individualism and selfishness or their protests will be a footnote in history.
The whole issue is made more complex by Trump's endorsement of (and by, I guess) the modern Nazi movement in America. When you embrace partisan politics and associate yourself with that kind of group, even otherwise 'good' things will be viewed with skepticism.
(For the record, I am one of those people who is uncomfortable voicing my political opinions at work; I'd never do it in the workplace, and have received harassment - mild, but very targeted - because of comments I've made here on HN and elsewhere on the internet. So I know what it's like to keep quiet for fear of cultural reprisal :)
Maybe it’s not politics that gets you into trouble, it just seems that some people will never be dominant enough for their tastes.
There are far left parties, but they do even worse than the Green's two state lower house seats and no more significant seats anywhere in the country, electing exactly no one to any even modestly significant office.
Hilariously enough, Clinton and Obama deported far and away more people.
Comments like "blood on the hands of $movement", by contrast, are battle fodder. Irrespective of your politics, that's the sort of thing that provokes worse from others and leads to all-out war, which we're trying to avoid on this site. So if you'd please not post like that here, we'd appreciate it.
Equality of opportunities/rights for the particular individual wherever they may be, not attempting to get equality of outcomes for the aggregate by harming individual rights or justifying local oppression by some wider goal.
If a gay person has to hide their orientation, it's bad - not because gays need protection, but because that individual is restricted.
If someone has to hide their religion, it's bad - not because that religion needs protection, but because that person gets restricted.
If someone has to hide their political affiliation - same thing, no matter if it's support of some presidential candidate, legalization or criminalization of some drug, support for or against unions, etc, etc.
The victim card being played here is quite pathetic. A religous conservative who is told they can’t discriminate against gay people claims you need tolerate and respect his intolerance and disrespect because of religious freedom.
Someone who benefitted from privilege, or born into an upper middle class household, claims discrimination if they write a screed on merit against their coworkers and suffer from it because of efforts to reach out and broaden the applicant base.
The “echo chamber” being complained about are broadly shared cultural values we expect Americans to hold, beliefs in All Men Are Created Equal, that really aren’t normal subjects of debate. The only issue debatable is the best policies to maintain them.
Many of the complaints don’t argue for how to achieve it, rather they take a rather extremist view of meritocracy and hyperindividualism like they just graduated from Ayn Rand University and try to apply it to the very messy real world.
Is it too much to ask to just do your work and if you don’t like policies against sexual harassment or racial or queer harassment at your company to go work somewhere that tolerates it?
In any case, this sounds more like other people's distaste is slowly grinding Thiel down and he's just trying to rationalise it to himself with talk of echo chambers and whatnot. You'd think he'd have more sympathy for minorities who have had to put up with that from birth but he does come across as someone who is frustrated when others don't subscribe to his exceptionalist view of himself.
It's not SV, it's Coventry he doesn't like, and he'll be sent there wherever he goes.
A random example: taller people and people with broader shoulders make more sales.
We are intelligent minds grafted clumsily onto apes.
"Feeling alienated" because others don't agree with you is a reasonable result; I mean, this is a zero sum game, all viewpoints can't be most popular everywhere. But it crosses the line when it comes to actual discrimination in the workplace, which is bad no matter whether it's done by or against the nationally dominant "tribe". If people have to shut up or face personal consequences (as opposed to getting ignored because the voice of others is considered more sane), then "You have every right to speak" has failed.
If I can say whatever I want but my political opponents (who want to implement evil policies for immoral reasons) can not, then we don't have free speech. Even if someone rabidly opposes free, inclusive, diverse society, says so, and gets punished for that - that's not a free, inclusive, diverse society; just as in that overused "Voltaire" (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) quote.
Political opponents will always consider and label each others policies and arguments as immoral and unacceptable, as you say, extreme and noxious; so unless we allow (in practice, by ensuring that people don't get punished for that by others) speech that seems immoral, unacceptable, extreme and noxious then we ensure that the political opposition doesn't get free speech. People should be able to talk in our workplace about why they like the noxious candidate and why the evil policy is needed (to achieve the immoral reason) without me or the workplace punishing them - otherwise I might not be able to talk in our workplace about why I like my candidate and why I want to have the opposite policy for incompatible moral reasons, which seem immoral and evil to them.
Pointing to the most extreme end of political spectrum as justification for silencing or ostracizing the people everywhere on that half of the spectrum is both disingenuous and terrible for the political atmosphere. Imagine the reversed situation, someone stated "our company should tolerate liberal views" and I responded by saying, "but what about the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, and the genocide perpetrated against the Ukrainians by the USSR?" It would be absurd, which is also how I regard this response.
Tolerating conservative views is no more an endorsement of Nazis and the holocaust than tolerating liberal views is an endorsement of the Khmer Rouge, the Holodmor, etc. Silicon Valley would be a better place without this kind of rhetoric.
> anti-science FUD types
Arguably, this could just as easily be applied to mainstream liberal views on the danger (or lack thereof) of nuclear power, GMOs, etc.
I suspect you've fallen for some propaganda here if you think the rich pay less in taxes in the US or that Republicans think they shouldn't pay more. The top 1% already pay half of all taxes at the federal level.
The argument comes down to what proportion of income should go to taxes at various income brackets. This is hardly a settled topic even in liberal countries like France.
A lot of my colleagues who happily brand themselves as liberal, all think unregulated illegal immigration will cause problem, I don't think there is any chance they will self identify as conservative.
As an individual I might agree with some of the points, but disagree with the rest, like I all for more restrictive gun control and think it is due to an outdated law. It is indeed a problem itself to force people into two buckets and create a us-vs-the-world mentality.
And not too long ago, hell, even currently in some places, it was considered a mainstream conservative view that gays should not have the same rights to marry. If a person holding that view were to work at, say, Grindr, I would absolutely expect them to receive push back on it.
AFDC got replaced with the more restrictive TANF as the primary federal-funded welfare program in the 1990s by the Republican Congress with Clinton’s support, but welfare was not repealed.
When you say you're "against racial diversity" you are saying you prefer racial homogeneity. If that's not what you mean, you should rethink how you state your preference. Many people would take that statement to mean that you're an avowed racist.
And regardless this is straying from the core point. Of course, advocating the mass extermination of Jews, Roma, or any other group would be grounds for a company to fire employees that make those statements - I did not and do not attempt to state that every piece of speech protected by the 1st Amendment should be allowed in the workplace. Rather, the simple principle is that tolerating a view that some people consider intolerant is not, itself, an act of intolerance. Let me put this in a scenario that is more appropriate to a workplace:
* You have two co-workers, A and B.
* A thinks that affirmative action (structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates) is necessary to have a tolerant workplace, and by extension not having these policies is an intolerant situation.
* B thinks that discriminating on the basis of sex or race in the hiring process is intolerant.
* Both A and B go to HR claiming that the other is making intolerant statements.
I would argue that if HR takes action against _either_ employee that would be an act of intolerance. Allowing A to make that statement isn't an act of intolerance against B, nor is B's an act of intolerance against A. Sure, I get that A _believes_ B's viewpoint to be intolerant and vice versa. But the company's decision to allow both statements is not an act of intolerance because of that. This is what I'm getting at by saying "there is no paradox of tolerance" in allowing speech. True, individual speakers may think the other is intolerance. But there is no intolerance in allowing these conflicting views to co-exist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
You know your situation better than I do, but based on your descriptions I'm with your company on these. You haven't painted a very sympathetic picture of whatever this joke item is, and as for comp, I mean, it seems pretty logical that men and women should be paid the same for the same role, no? That doesn't mean you can't hire/retain talent, you just implement a leveling system like every other company and promote high performers to higher levels.
As for Google, are we talking about the guy who was a dick and caused a massive PR problem and got fired for it? And if your claim is that companies are making bad business decisions and you're pointing at Google, doesn't their 750B market cap undermine the point?
Again, the fact that the majority of people would call a given viewpoint bigoted is just as much a statement about the environment that calls the view bigoted as it is about the view itself. Plenty of mainstream liberal views would be considered bigoted in other developed democracies (e.g. a lot of European countries don't practice affirmative action). Conversely, plenty of mainstream conservative views would be considered bigoted by liberals (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that I don't need to give an example).
[1] "Prejudice is an affective feeling towards a person or group member based solely on their group membership. The word is often used to refer to preconceived, usually unfavorable, feelings towards people or a person because of their sex, gender, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality, beauty, occupation, education, criminality, sport team affiliation or other personal characteristics. In this case, it refers to a positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their perceived group membership" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice
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.
Yet the social problems in SF are probably some of the worst in the US.
It's pretty shocking.
> Arguably, this could just as easily be applied to mainstream liberal views on the danger (or lack thereof) of nuclear power, GMOs, etc.
Yeah, it's obnoxious and dangerous there, too.
I feel this is more of an indictment of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the gargantuan power players in SV than of the alleged political beliefs (techno-utopianism, liberalism) being discussed. The line of discussion that this thread represents, which seems common on HN these days, seems to disparage liberalism as if it is to blame for being used as cover by powerful corporations that seem to me to be more anarcho-capitalist than anything else.
Are there really very many techno-utopians in SV, or are they mostly people and companies who use the language of making the world a better place as a cover for consuming it economically?
I'm anti-diversity not because I don't believe races exist, I'm anti-diversity because I think hiring people for the color of the skin is itself racist. Affirmative action has made me skeptical of every woman or "diverse" person in high places, because when I see their authority, all I think about is how they had an edge just because of their biology.
I really don't care about natural racial diversity, it's inevitable in our country. However, I'm not really a fan of cultural diversity. A culture defines what is expected from one another socially, and without any set norms, people have no predictable way to interact, which is no good IMO. I understand that multinational corporations are required to allow for multiculturalism so they can behave globally, but I don't see why local areas can't have their own cultures.
I have reasoning behind my opinions, but because they are currently taboo, the only way I can discuss my opinions are on anonymous forums like this. That's sad to me. I may be wrong, there may be a flaw in my reasoning, but because I can't discuss them in public, the discovery of those flaws becomes delayed.
And in case I didn't make this clear, that was just a quick dump of views that I think are generally considered conservative. Real life is much more nuanced than a list of bullet points. I fully agree that there are, for example, people who want tougher immigration laws but otherwise don't consider themselves conservative.
[1] https://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ I realize this is just one example, but people on my own company's forums have caught flak for using the word "meritocracy".
Using that term is going ensure that a large portion of the population disregards your argument out of disgust (at the co-opting of a historically powerful word for political points). Use it if you like, but you should expect that it will lose you debates if you do. There is probably a different term you could come up with that would be better received.
I would expect you to agree with this since you say you haven't observed a systematic difference in performance between these groups. No?
My own thinking is that it's good to invite a diverse applicant pool, but final hiring decisions shouldn't use diversity except as a tie-breaker. At the same time one should try to be aware of one's own biases, and rigorously careful not to devalue candidates unlike oneself.
If the Valley is such a "liberal echo chamber", why is it that women, homosexual, transsexuals, etc. are the ones still receiving the death threats.
When I see rich, conservative, white men shivering in fear from getting death threats for expressing their religious or political beliefs, I'll worry about your "echo chamber" my precious fragile little snowflakes.
Honestly I think it is, although if I were having a discussion with a coworker I would couch it in slightly different terms, because many of my coworkers aren't very familiar with guns. e.g. defining assault weapons (varies depending on locale), asking why they are concerned about this like bayonet lugs, are they aware of anyone who has been killed by a bayonet charge in the US since the Civil War, what's wrong with barrel shrouds, etc
Having children is literally the most socially acceptable thing you can do amongst almost all political ideologies. Its incredibly common and parents are held up on a pedestal just for existing.
But he thinks the liberal elites are somehow out to get him for being a parent and he's a persecuted minority. He's said "liking being a parent is such an unpopular opinion."
He has a million other benign things he thinks he's being persecuted for but the kids thing is just the most bizarre and totally detached from reality.
It's like, you'd have to totally ignore reality to have this viewpoint... At the same time it seems like a really sad life.
I wonder if they actually believe this shit or it's just a means to an end.
Not sure how much clearer it can be. Sorry I substituted the word virtues for sins. I gave a cursory glance to a google search for 7 deadly sins and found [1] which led me to [2]
If discrimination based on race or sex is bad, then why is affirmative action good?
I don't like in the valley but I suspect that you and many others are being drawn into an image of the place and of politics in general that is very distorted.
Anyway, mea culpa. Thanks for moderating.
This isn’t new; women have been telling us this for many years now.
Given that the definition of an "assault weapon" has nothing to do with the actual capabilities of a firearm, and everything to do with the shape of its grip, the presence of collapsing stocks, etc. I'd say yes it is pretty absurd. For example this [1] rifle is exactly the same in caliber, capability, and general functionality as the infamous AR-15 yet is not targeted by even the most restrictive States' definitions of assault weapons. Heck, even liberal publications are catching on to the fact that "assault weapons" are a red herring: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/sunday-review/the-assault...
> what is the absurd part here? how many kids can a gay person be alleged to have killed just by being gay?
Pick a more relevant liberal policy: How many people have been killed by prisoners on parole? Should all politicians who support reduced prison sentences and earlier parole, as well as individuals who support those policies, be held responsible for the crimes that parolees and released prisoners commit crimes? This number is much greater than the number of school shootings.
That fact should not be used as justification to ostracize, or otherwise take actions against people who believe in more lenient parole and less prison time - and people who support conservative policies should get the same respect.
[1] https://image.sportsmansguide.com/adimgs/e/6/637956_ts.jpg
Even if I set aside the incorrect assertion that Trump can't do anything against transgendered persons, self-evidently he can look the other way, as can DOJ, and federal prosecutors. And now that means people are left to defend themselves, or not. Is that justice?
https://transequality.org/1557-FAQ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/trump-adm...
The Fair Housing Act is supposed to prevent racial discrimation in lending. Does it still happen? Yes. In fact it's widespread and it's institutionalized. It's baked into the system, and the free market, being amoral, games the system to the benefit of those who are already privileged and can pay for that privilege. This is maybe a surprise if you don't know about these things.
https://www.apnews.com/ae4b40a720b74ad8a9b0bfe65f7a9c29
I think people have no idea how fragile the system is, in particular when the head of state impugns, without evidence, and denigrates the federal agencies we depend on to carry out the imperfect justice system that we have. Papering over reality with ideas the legal system will be the superman to save us from the malignancy in the White House is somewhere in between wishful thinking and ignorant.
But sense I'm neither populist or a religious conservative, I'm just as much in the bubble as anyone.
As to your second part, as to what its origin is, its clearly in response to a multigenerational systemic suppression of certain classes. That is not in debate, and frankly from my white male perch, I continue to see firsthand much more of the lingering slights and biases against certain classes and groups, that affect their career and their inclusion, than I ever have any anti white male sentiment or anti white male advancent credo.
So in summary - I really dont think much has changed, and that isnt a good thing.
Marc Andressen said something similar in an interview, I'm going to dig it up and post it here as an edit. Here it is, the relevant bits are around 28 minutes: https://a16z.com/2017/05/15/andreessen-primack-dc-tech-polic...
This statement shows a big divide between our worldviews. You believe that they fail to succeed in our country because they are part of a disadvantaged group, while I believe it's because they either 1) lack the money to earn social status signals required to start a career(degree, social network), or 2) their culture prevents success. There are plenty of disadvantaged white folk who are held back by those two issues too, yet mainstream media calls them "privileged" because they happen to be white, despite the fact that they grew up poor, live in an economically depressed area, work manual labor, and have a culture that doesn't strive for more.
Sure, historic racism would explain why the divides aren't symmetrical, but I think the whole nation would be better if our politicians would focus on economics instead of identity politics.
Women should have money and power they shouldn’t have to marry into money and power. That point alone shows me we aren’t really having the same conversation, that your idea of a female power is “marrying a rich dude”
Otherwise we agree. I come from a very white, very depressed region. I understand the dynamics well.
As to the govt, I believe the vast majority of all social programs do deal with things on an economic basis. So I dont see the conflict. Once again, not an either or. Most things arent.
I know my negative emotional reaction to seeing a "diverse" leader is racist and sexist, but that's not going away while their advantage is codified in every single corporate handbook in the country.
I fail to understand how "crying Donald J Trump is the president of the United States" equals being an "insane insufferable far left crazy." Even if you mostly agree with him politically, you may still be very upset about someone who boasted about sexually assaulting women representing you/your political beliefs. That's just one example.
The question isn't, or shouldn't be, "Do we have representation of women/conservatives/whatever in proportion to demographics?" Instead, the question should be "Are we treating people unfairly?"
For example, I'd feel quite comfortable wearing a Burnie Sanders shirt or hat to work. I'd expect that wearing a MAGA hat would cause problems.
I'm willing to entertain a social structure that protects human agency in a world where our traditional means of measuring human value are quickly becoming obsolete, but I think we need a lot more agreement that's the direction we need to head...
The treatment of women in tech is a very well documented issue, to the point where one would have to be willfully ignorant of the issue. The biggest “evidence” of the War on Christmas is a coffee cup, and companies simply acknowledging the fact that many other faiths and cultures have celebrations during that time of year.
It's been around a long time, but I guess it's a bit fiddly? I'm not sure why other sites haven't adopted similar processes.
There might be some diversity of economic matterts; depends on whether you make money on walking through the outer fringes of legality (e.g. AirBnB) or not. On social issues that you mention SV is far more of an echo chamber.
Although I do wonder where you're getting the idea about groups that "deserve it". Personal responsibility, vs. identity politics seems to be a rather large dividing line between liberals and conservatives, and "deserve it" as applied to groups is a liberal belief, not conservative.
And as silly and ignorant as Coulter is, at the moment when one starts saying that she does not have a right to speak here, one signs off on his moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Most people aren't strongly on one side or the other. It is possible to vote for the Republican Party and still decry the white supremacists and neo-Nazis. It is possible to be a Democrat supporter and not believe that all Republicans are white supremacists.
In reality, most people simply don't care one way or another. I don't talk to my friends about politics, not because it's controversial, but because none of my friends give a shit.
I'm not American, but I think exactly the same thing applies there.
Ohhhhh yeah.
I have to admit I have a limited amount of personal experience with the South, but this is both the impression I have from my limited experience and what people who grew up in the South but live in the Northeast now tell me from their experiences.
Or as someone who grew up in Louisiana told me "'Southern Hospitality' and hospitality anywhere else is the same except that outside the South they don't feel the need to brag about it and also offer it to people that aren't white."
It's just sooooooo so so so shallow, some of the stuff I hear Southerners brag about I'm thinking, in my head, "well literally anyone I know would do that but that so I'm not impressed and, nobody would feel the need to brag about it later."
I just hate how shallow and insincere it is dressed up in in the thin veil of sincerity
Come to think of it, it would be just as illegal to openly compare the living standard of even a third-rate party apparatchick vs. that of a factory worker, for whom the system ostensibly worked.
I am not sure if hiding the rather natural that people end up differently (even though in places like Cuba or USSR where you end up depends far less on your abilities than in the US) is in any way better than having the differences in the open.
Being left alone is all I ever wanted as a gay man. But the gay rights activists are demanding all sorts of positive rights and privileges from the government, and worse yet, they are trying to do it in my name.
It is entirely possible to support someone's form of leadership without entirely supporting all of the person's ideas.
That's why I specifically said Trump's vile brand of leadership. It's OK to agree or disagree with his ideas, but leadership is far more than having good or bad ideas. Leadership is ultimately about people and having a selfless, coherent vision for the people you represent.
The "paradox of tolerance" is only a paradox if you assume that society can determine objectively for its citizens what constitutes "tolerant" and "intolerant" behavior; such societies are by necessity totalitarian.
In a free society, there is no paradox of tolerance; in free societies, individuals make their own choices and judgments about each other, and there are many different, conflicting views about which choices are tolerant and which are intolerant.
Economically SV may not be too far from the mainstream, because really, if you drive away not only Thiel but the rest of VCs, who's gonna throw millions on your new world-changing blockchain crowdsourced augmented-reality chat app?!
Socially, though, SV positions itself far, far left of not only mainstream, but even of the outer fringes of common sense. Which comes out quite ironic in the end, e.g. when you look at tyhe stuff in Damore's lawsuit (the ones still proceeding) vs. the fact that Google is simultaneously being sued for underpaying women.
driven to professional exile
ridden out on a [digital] rail
digital skimmington
pilloried
[digitally/professionally] tarred and feathered
Seriously, here is how it went down from what I remember:
Damore writes controversial internal only paper -> another googler takes the document meant for internal only viewing and shares it with the media -> someone removes most/all graphs and citations to make it look more like an opinion piece (most likely to flame up more media attention) -> journalist posts internal document without permission from company.
That is at least 2 people going out of there way (in a most likely illegal way too) essentially trying to start a witch hunt on this guy and ruin his life for writing 1 paper just because they do not agree with him.
The key part of merpnderp's quote is "or agrees with any of his policies". There are tons things that are perceived as "Trump's policies" (and some are in fact his policies) that are just mainstream Republican policies. Just don't confuse "policies" with rhetoric, because in the case of Trump he says one thing and does another all the time. Of course it's a bit odd to me that people who think he's a pathological liar (a viewpoint I can totally understand!) always act surprised when his words don't match his actions...
So the irony is that because of people’s GOP hate they feel need to hate Trump because he ran as a Republican without actually looking to see what’s happening here.
If someone truly hated the Republican Party, they should at least recognize that Trump is their enemy’s enemy.
What, exactly, are the “all sorts...of rights and privileges” that are unique to homosexuals that you are referring to?
Every time a politician tells me more housing won’t make it cheaper, I posit the hypothetical “what if we built 100,000 more units? No? How about 1 million more? 5 million more?”
The answer I get is the same: “well, we don’t want to change the character of the city. Do we really want to be like New York?”
Press the question enough and the subject will eventually confess.
Since WW2, the vast majority of our financing mechanisms and housing policy has been aimed at creating family housing because that was what the parents of the Baby Boomers wanted and needed. Meanwhile, our population has diversified away from that. Plus there are myriad zoning policies, tax policies etc at all levels of government that are pieces of the puzzle for how SF has ended up this way.
There isn't anyone on the planet who actually knows exactly what needs to be dismantled to untangle this mess and trying to do so comes at high risk. It isn't at all unusual for the baby to be thrown out with the bath water when dealing with things as complicated as city planning.
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. It is why I took a class on homelessness and public policy. I have a good grasp of what is generally wrong. I can't give you a point by pint list if instructions on how to fix it for SF.
San Francisco proper is physically much smaller than New York City, 231 sq. miles vs 468. Part of it is built on infill, reclaiming land from the waters around it. Such infill has serious structural limitations. You can't build on it like it is solid ground. San Francisco also needs to be built to withstand serious earthquakes. All of these geographic factors further constrain what you can realistically build there.
I generally agree that simply building more housing would help. But when I lived in Fairfield years ago, SROs in San Francisco were $1000/mo. San Francisco is one if the few US cities that still has more than a few SROs and it still is not cheap enough. I am not convinced the problem is as easy to solve as you suggest.
Easy fixes very often come at a hidden cost. That cost can be quite high, catastrophically so.
I know less about Japan, but everything I've read suggests that Japanese are also extremely racist.
As for Google having a huge market cap, isn't it a a rather common liberal/left-wing trope that uch great wealth comes from being evil?
Was early American society free for its time? Sure. Was it enormously intolerant? Yes. (Hint: black people were property because of their supposed inferiority. For similar reasons, white women were pretty close property themselves.) America has gotten somewhat better, but the Nadir [1], Jim Crow [2], redlining [3], white flight [4], and the Southern Strategy [5] make it clear that has only happened partially and with significant setbacks. The US right's recent hostility to GLBTQ rights and acceptance make it clear it's not just race.
Are some people going to argue that Nazis in favor of violent ethnic cleansing are good people and that one can't really say they're intolerant of the people they're willing to kill? Sure. Can we still come up with a useful-enough working definition of "tolerance" (and therefore the "paradox of tolerance") that will save lives? Definitely. Many countries have done this successfully, and suggesting they're totalitarian just doesn't fly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
The biggest issues I've seen are just not getting discriminated against. For example, the biggest fight I've seen in my time in California was Prop 8, which was very clearly about equal protection under the law. The next-biggest was marriage equality, which is just removing needless heterosexual privilege from marriage law.
It would be weird to feel offended, or more specifically, "discriminated" against, were you to discuss publicly, in the company of other co-workers, your specific actions in the bedroom or bathroom.
For example, I hope no one is arguing for ensuring "our free speech rights" to talk about the details of their bowl movements or bedroom proclivities in a sprint planning meeting.
> otherwise I might not be able to talk in our workplace about why I like my candidate and why I want to have the opposite policy for incompatible moral reasons, which seem immoral and evil to them.
Why do people expect a different response to, and treatment of, political opinions?
Even if what you would consider a "political opinion" is advertised, circulated or pushed by your employer, your coworkers, "general vibes" - why the expectation that any and all political opinions should be granted the utmost respect, neutrality and objectivity? And most specifically, why this expectation in the workplace? When has the workplace become a "safe space", where, if one political opinion is discussed, all must be allowed to?
Sexual orientation was deemed (ImNAL, my simple understanding) a protected class - in that, we (via our legal system) agreed discrimination against this class is illegal (like age, race).
Are you arguing for not only political affiliation, but political expression to be protected as well?
Should, say, an extremely conservatively run family business be allowed to deny employment to a candidate specifically because they have strong liberal views?
I personally think political opinions and affiliation are nowhere near as fundamentally universal as age and race. For one, opinions are a choice. Therefore, 100% yes, such a business would be well within its rights to deny the candidate employment.
Workplaces are dictatorships, not democracies. If part of that absolute command structure includes the discussion of only one side of a political opinion, it does not follow that all opinions should be given the opportunity to be heard (for fear that it _might_ discourage its existence and expression nonetheless!). I would even go so far as to say perhaps you are too eager to express your own opinions, and too quick to feel threatened by the sound of others. Since politics is an expression of values, are you not holding one set of values, while in the company of what seems to be scores of people who hold no such ones themselves?
Politics is an inherently divisive, generally un-or-misinformed and emotional topic. I have some political opinions not everyone, or even most, will agree with (find me an example of two people who share in common all political opinions!). If I have such an urge to also present those view points, I would then also rationally be prepared for the backlash. My opinions have not been censored, I can go to any street corner, website or pub to discuss any such opinion I might have.
My employment ramifications would be the same as discussing activities of the bedroom or bathroom in those environments; in taste, a private conversation of a sensitive topic. Loudly and publicly; a risk calculation incurred by my employer - one they are allowed to make with any prejudice they desire.
You still haven't given any indication that you underand the weight of the term "lynching". If you'd like to, maybe start with this slim book, which I found sobering: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0933121180
The only example I can think of where someone lost their job due to a donation was Brendan Eich, whose political cause was changing the constitution to strip a civil right from LGBT people. You are worried about the effect on his family, but he was literally trying to harm hundreds of thousands of LGBT families, and the LGBT families at Mozilla were very reasonably afraid of more direct harm.) Why are you concerned about only one kind of family?
(And I'll note that if his career has been harmed, it's hard to measure. He's the CEO of a company with $42m in funding, which doesn't sound like death to me.)
Your taxonomy is also suspicious. The problem is not people having opinions; it's them acting upon them. And make no mistake, political speech is action. The whole point of it is to change society. That's why we protect it so fiercely under law: its enormous power to shape democracy for the better.
More than that, your dudgeon here is anti-freedom. If people don't want to work with Eich, who are you to tell them that they have to? He gets his freedom of speech; they get their freedom of association. If you don't like that, you get to exercise your rights to speech and association.
Of course, if you really wanted to pursue that, you'd have to end at-will employment. It would be an interesting world where nobody would be fired for a political opinion. But it would require absolutely massive government intervention in employment, so I doubt you'd find many conservative backers.
I work at a FAANG company and while most people use mac, email is still without competition and irc is still somewhat used but on the decline since our company is so big we now have our own in house tool that works better.
HOWEVER, Damore is a REALLY good example of the kind nitwit snowflake that deserves all the approbation he is receiving.
If you are sitting in a corporation and are about to do something that is going to cause political shockwaves, you need to make sure that your position and stance is absolutely rock solid and airtight.
This is true whether you are talking about technology or social behavior. If you're going to political war, you had better have incontrovertible facts and arguments and they had best be overwhelming. You need to run your presentation past a couple of friends and colleagues to solidify it. If you half-ass it, you're going to get your head handed to you on a platter.
Well, guess what? He half-assed it with a bunch of unsupported conjecture and weak arguments that people destroyed almost immediately with real evidence and research and then whined about the fact that people handed him his head.
Which probably STILL would have been okay if he actually admitted to being wrong and put his head back down. But, no, nitwits like him feel that not simply accepting everything he says as correct is terribly, horribly unfair. As such, he doubled down on stuff that everybody already showed was wrong and basically just tried to shout louder.
And then was shocked when he got canned.
The worst part is, there ARE lots of outstanding questions and issues about diversity programs and initiatives. What should that actual goal of such a program be? How do you measure whether it is succeeding? Is success for the company the same as success for the group? Is success for the group the same as success for the individual? What are the downsides of such programs?
The infill argument is totally bogus. The majority of the Financial District, which is where the majority of high rises are today, is on the very same infill you claim cannot support high rise structures. Singapore is largely infill and is mostly high rises. Tokyo is very dense and is in an earthquake prone area.
The absolute area argument is similarly specious. That argument would be valid only if, per unit area, we were already building at a density similar to New York. Moreover, it’s irrelevant how large the city is within its political boundaries if you consider this to be a regional problem, which it is.
So I’m not really sure whose side you’re on in this matter since you muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.
The problem is entirely political. You can either help or make excuses.
For most of history, holding progressive or even liberal viewpoints carried social consequences. Polite company was conservative company. Now the script has flipped, and the pendulum swings the other way. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Characterizing my comment as merely making excuses and being part of the problem is not good faith engagement. I am bowing out now.
Now, Damore may not be a very nice person himself (he did go to work for Google of his own free will, after all), but he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback on some corporate training that he was forced to attend. He backed it with some arguments that while not necessarily water-tight and incontroversible, were stronger than any debunkings of his memo that I have seen, which mostly amounted to calling it "pathetic bleatings" and claiming that it is wrong because it could not possibly be right.
Saying "you are a terrible person and I will hound you until one of us gets fired" or somesuch is not quite "handing him his head". If anything, it conmfirms that Damore is probably more right than his detractors. So while it certainly might have made sense for him to shut up, make a Cultural Revoluition style confession and keep his job. But faulting him for being fireed over a memo that he didn't leak and that is, if anything, far more reasonable than many an action that seems to be accepted at Google (viz. the story of Corey Altheide).
I just don't see how he is a big snowflake here.
From Wikipedia:
City and county 231.89 sq mi (600.59 km2)
• Land 46.89 sq mi (121.46 km2)
• Water 185.00 sq mi (479.14 km2)
So both figures are correct from some perspective, but yours is the more relevant for purposes of talking about building stuff.
I'm trying to think of a better term. The point is the concept. And in my defense the Wikipedia definition aligns with my usage of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching.
> The only example I can think of where someone lost their job due to a donation was Brendan Eich
Yeah that was just an example. Another similar scenario I can think of off the top of my head: the president of the University of Missouri was coerced into resigning because he said something that equated to, "I don't believe in institutional racism".
I'm not trying to paint doom and gloom or anything I was responding with the counter argument to, "intolerance wants a voice", which is (naturally by now), "only an intolerant person would condone silencing in the first place".
You can find similar clips from Hillary and Schumer, just not from this decade.
( And before anyone thinks that 'oppress' is too strong a word, the inability to marry caused tax and inheritance implications for LGBTQ individuals in California, some of which were unrecoverable. To this point, consider that people who died during Prop 8 will never get justice; will never get equal representation. )
I am sorry you feel like your views are unwelcome/oppressed, but religious groups in the United States have a very long and extremely well-documented history of doing real, lasting, absolutely life-altering harm to LGBTQ individuals. This harm caused to LGBTQ Americans isn't the same as feeling like your views are unwelcome at your place of work, and I hope you can at least see the difference.
Brendan Eich may sincerely hold his religious beliefs, but he didn't stop at simply believing: he gave money to further an utterly poisonous cause that brought real, and in some case unrecoverable, harm to tens of thousands of Californians.
I recall Bush being constantly vilified by the left for having a tiny intellect, for constantly making gaffes like "is our children learning", for the Iraq war (he's a war criminal etc), for drone strikes, for supporting torture, for not caring about the environment at all - especially the shock when a simple minded Texan oilman won out over intellectual climate change activist Al Gore.
There were many people not just in the USA but around the world who felt they could not speak up in support of Bush, outside of rural America.
Seems like time is erasing or distorting these memories. I remember him being just as hated as Trump is today.
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
It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.
So why does Pichai still have a job?
We know the reason - because CEO-firing moral outrage only works in one direction in California.
you're permitting a standard political talking point to be an entire topic of discussion, and then screening out some individual replies because they invoke additional standard political talking points.
you're allowing some standard political talking points and disallowing others. if you're doing that, it would be convenient for your users if you were to specify which standard political talking points are valid topics of discussion, and which other standard political talking points will get your comments banned.
The problem is that the word "diversity" doesn't actually mean merely having the presence of different races. Nobody who argues for "racial diversity" ceases to argue the moment the first black or Asian person is hired.
Rather, the phrase "racial diversity" has become code for its own kind of racism against white people. It doesn't mean the dictionary definition of diversity, consisting of multiple types. It means specifically eliminating and pushing out white people on the grounds that there are lots of them around in western countries, so harming them in some concrete, objective way isn't really harmful.
Moreover, the tactics normally used to obtain this so-called diversity are usually anti-meritocratic: literally the promotion and rewarding of people who do not deserve it on the basis of their work or skills alone, but just on the basis of skin colour. This is poisonous and demeaning to those people who do work hard, but don't benefit from being born "diverse".
It's really quite sad that this is actually a topic for debate, and that the ever more extreme elements in California have tried to make "meritocracy" a dirty word. But ultimately it'll be to the benefit of companies in other parts of the world who don't care about this strange and poisonous offshoot of political dialogue. I doubt there are many companies in Russia or China that force all employees to spend time on unconscious bias training, or who reliability promote unqualified people because of their DNA.
I agree it seems odd to believe that anyone could be against having children. But the world is full of large groups of people who hold odd and unsubstantiated opinions. Perhaps he's met people who really do look down on him for having kids. Perhaps he's stumbled across a group of old fashioned Malthusians who think children = population growth = destroying the environment and he's extrapolated that belief out incorrectly onto a much wider group.
To your wider point, conservatives are absolutely victimised in some parts of society. That's what the entire article in the WSJ is about. That's what happened to Damore. Note that Damore filed a complaint with the NLRB: they wrote a memo that put the word "scientific" in scare quotes, and stated that bringing up scientific studies of gender differences was sexual harassment. So literally attempting to argue conservative viewpoints by reference to scientific studies is now considered sexual harassment and the government will not defend it: if that isn't going to create a feeling of victimisation, what is?
Oh, that's interesting, I would have thought 2/3 or more. I'd be fascinated to see a breakdown by country; is there one online somewhere? [looks] Ah, there was one in 2011. Maybe I could do one of those polls 'What country do you live in', doesn't seem to be a recent one.
ps I didnt stay long at all on Quora or the StackExchanges, from the amazingly inept modding. Here it's awesome, inspiring even. Thank you!
Please do put a link if you can find it easily. Wading through the history on HN is non-trivial. I will certainly accept legally filed complaints as evidence.
And, they damn sure should have gotten more than slaps on the wrist for threats of physical violence.
> he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback
And even if I were doing this on a technical issue, I'm going to make sure my arguments are solid before I send it into the ether if the issue is going to cause political grief. That's just common sense.
> stronger than any debunkings of his memo
This one from the Economist is a good general start (I chose the Economist because it doesn't really fall in the "liberal rag" category that most people would place things like Salon, Wired, etc.) https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last-w...
There are lots of other problems with his memo that the whole "social science" field that he is quoting has come under strong dispute in the last decade or so.
The most significant point is that Damore ignores any evidence that doesn't support his point. If you're going to be controversial, you have to explain the stuff that doesn't agree with you as well.
> But faulting him for being fired over a memo that he didn't leak
I thought he explicitly posted it to internal Google circulation. I really hate how it moved to the press (people who did THAT should be fired as well), but I do not believe that he simply gave a confidential memo to HR and then it got leaked. Please do correct me if I am wrong.
Should Damore have lost his job? In my opinion, no.
However, only an idiot goes looking for bear without a really big gun and being surprised when he gets mauled.
1. your immigrant coworkers who entered the country on H1B or other visas;
2. coworkers who benefited from affirmative action to get into university;
3. friends/relatives of law-abiding-but-undocumented aliens.
You might think you are just making abstract policy statements. But to your listeners, you are making threats to destroy their livelihood and their families. Of course they react negatively!
How would you react if someone, in the name of abstract policy, argued that people belonging to your demographic group don't deserve jobs or should be kicked out of the country?
Does that sound unfamiliar? If so, it’s probably because you never read what he actually wrote, and instead just accepted unquestioning the media propaganda.
Many news sources also spread the same lie you are, so I assume you’re just parroting the headlines (like many of us are guilty of). The problem is, the dishonesty of this propaganda does real harm.
However, such a position is very much unusual and marginal in the US or (IMHO) the Anglosphere in general. By contrast, I had encountered some rather aggressive childfree activists on the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet.
I see Trump's rise as a response to people on the left who celebrate "the end of men", expel men without giving them an opportunity to defend themselves, unapologetically depict men and white people (and white men most of all) as evil, demand white people "absent themselves", and offer jobs for which white people need not apply. Not "far-left crazies", but major media outlets and universities.
When the media and academic culture is so toxic to any white men who speak up for their own interests, only someone who has no filter, like Trump, dares to speak at all.
For the most part, they ignored Obama's many gaffes (RSPCT, 51 states, "corpse"-man, bring inefficiencies to our health care system, etc...) while endlessly mocking Republicans for similar gaffes.
Yes, that's correct. But not forced to be accepted as a debatable idea, a polite disagreement, or a view point that deserves a seat at the table.
>(structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates)
This is not affirmative action. Affirmative action is structuring hiring policies such that everyone gets an equal chance at an offer - even if it means that some groups get more help to get there than others.
Hence the comic:http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads...
Is being anti-abortion bigotry & hate?
Given that the discussion was about the tendency of Indians to support Trump (at least in SV tech)...
... that's just over-the-top outrageous racist, man.
Equal outcomes isn't really compatible with equal opportunities.
Advocates of equal outcomes want fewer opportunities for people from whatever group they label "overrepresented" or "privileged". In the most extreme cases, they want opportunities to be designated for certain groups and forbidden to others.
There is an a implications to everything. Have an opinion on healthcare, and someone might die according to you preferred version of it.
He participated within the political system, he did not "[believe] that it is okay to actively oppress LGBTQ employees", except, in your interpretation, by participating in the political system. This extends to "any potential employees who believe in LGBTQ equality" in the same way it extends to anyone with any political opinion; I could mirror the exact same sentiment wrt pro-choice - "believes it is ok to actively murder" etc.
Also why is setting up a company so expensive.
One rightwing think tank did a survey of countries and the UK came out as abetter place to do business :-)
Obviously, yes, there is a substantive difference between removing someone who has only entered so far as the border checkpoint is on the US side of the border and removing someone who has been living in the US. That's the whole point of pointing it out.
As far as I know, there are no remaining laws explicitly targeting e.g. a race, and racial discrimination is socially taboo. A lot of people recognize that and make the invalid argument I described above — that everyone now is treated equally. IMO, a lot of the left operates in the space between that and what you've described, where they want to eliminate implicitly discriminatory laws and social norms.
I'm also genuinely curious — let's say an industry discriminates against a group of people (we'll use the tech industry and either women or conservatives, to keep this somewhat neutral). How do you try to correct the lack of equal opportunity without it looking something like trying to achieve equal outcomes?
There are many different sets of "social values and political ideologies" in the Bay Area. That was the glory of it for me. I have met all sorts of radicals and artists and weirdos here. And plenty of perfectly normal people, but whose notions of "normal" don't overlap all that much. E.g., the Lebanese-American family that ran a store in my neighborhood. The Latino family in the apartment next door. GLBT families far more into normcore than I'll ever be. Etc, etc.
I think the problem with both the WSJ piece and your approach is that "social values and political ideologies" is some sort of code, an attempt to frame a very particular strain of conservativism as just another kind of viewpoint while carefully not looking at the contents of that strain.
The only viewpoints I've seen people be actively hostile to here are ones that already include active hostility to other people. If you start out with some anti-gay slurs in the Castro, for example, and you will definitely be made to feel that there is something wrong with you. And that's not shocking to me at all; after a lifetime of hostility and abuse from self-proclaimed conservatives, gay people are quite reasonably sensitive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end...
> the rules intended to protect victims of sexual assault mean students have lost their right to due process
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-un...
> professor Bret Weinstein refused to comply with students interested in 'social justice' that demanded a day without white people on campus
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/05/30/evergreen...
> The ad said the [University of Louisville] Department of Physics and Astronomy “announces a tenure-track assistant professor position that will be filled by an African-American, Hispanic American or a Native American Indian.”
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/12/16/u-l-ripped-h...
Those are only examples to prove these claims aren't "baseless". If you're interested, I'm sure you can find more such incidents yourself.
Also, while it sounds like you downvoted me, I'm not being downvoted (net). Perhaps there are more people out there who are aware of these things than you think.
I could just as easily say that colleges don't support interracial marriage based on Bob Jones University but that would be intellectually dishonest.
Keep in mind too, these aren't fringe political beliefs. It's generally accepted in non-western countries that men and women are different, for example, yet somehow that's a fireable offense here.
Just because somebody's opponents are biased doesn't mean they aren't.
Note that I am not saying that #3 is not the case! I'm saying that I personally have not been given reliable reason to believe #3 over #2, or reason to believe that the people who have tried to get me to believe #3 are competent and respect their own fallibility to the point where I could tentatively trust them.
Ironically, the more aggressively people try to get me to agree with #3, the more skeptical I tend to become of it. To me this is analogous to the AI risk debate, where I at least partially worry about it because the arguments against from otherwise intelligent people have been so consistently lackluster.
edit: To iterate on that earlier "which side disgusts you less" comment:
As with the Trump election, people on either side tend to assume that people on the other side agree with their candidate.
This is not necessarily the case. Often when forced to choose between two alternatives, the question is down to which outcome seems to you more desperate. People who vote Trump consider immigration a desperate struggle. People who vote $not_trump probably consider sexism/racism a desperate struggle. Both sides are willing to sacrifice some values so that they can try and preserve others.
I believe the debate between #2 and #3 is mainly down to whether you consider sexism or knowledge the more desperate struggle. Personally I tend to come down on the knowledge side, possibly because I am not personally affected by sexism. This does not mean I will condone sexism, it means that I will trade it off, if I am utterly forced to, against a value that I consider more vital. That does not mean I wouldn't like to reduce sexism if I could; it does mean that when people are censured due to citing scientific studies, I feel that something I consider more urgent than gender equality is at stake.
In any forced tradeoff, there is only one value that can win. I think sexism and racism are serious issues, but I don't think they are the most serious issues. If that makes me a misogynist in people's eyes, then so be it.
Of course, in any remotely sane civil society we would try to negotiate solutions that satisfy the values of everybody involved. This is a large part of why the aggressive, condescending rhetoric of certain parts of #3 is so frightening to me. I see no reason why the fight against sexism and racism has to be at odds with truth; it's an unforced overaggression that's alienating people like me for no reason.
In summary: my issues are with the #3 methodology, not the #3 position.
I'd be very interested if you could find examples of publicly-funded universities (as these universities are) telling black people not to come to campus or not to apply for a job.
Or a respected mainstream media publication (equivalent to The Atlantic) reviewing a book discussing The End of Women.
Not to start a political flame war but that's the only thing I disagree with you on - mostly. I think guns allow for easy mass murder at a distance but you have to have a mental illness along with some other potential extreme views, to be able to jump the mental hurdles where mass murder is an acceptable option.
The people committing these horrendous crimes are not the same people as most gun owners. That being said I think some federally mandated gun control laws are needed - leaving it totally up to the states allows things like what happened in Florida to occur.
> Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...
If you can frame those issues outside of politics, I think they are in the US too. Once people think their political affiliations come into play it becomes personal like the scum that use Emacs.
For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really?
Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency.
It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end....
It's a complete mischaracterization to call that celebrating the end of men. If anything it is worrying about it.
I also don't totally reject the notion that biology can explain differences in outcome. I just think that explanation should be a last resort after the far more likely causes of bias, random path dependency, and perverse incentives and feedback loops are ruled out. Blaming biology first is like immediately jumping to "compiler bug" when your program crashes. People who jump first to biology are probably racist or sexist.
As for immigration vs social justice: neither are IMHO existential struggles. Existial struggles are things like sustaining a modern economy post population growth and transitioning beyond fossil fuels before we either crash and burn in a Malthusian catastrophe or destroy our atmosphere and oceans. If we don't fix those things social justice and immigration issues won't matter much to the survivors of the nuclear war that ensues as global civilization collapses.
As for Trump: he is categorically unfit to be president, but Clinton was also an awful choice. That election was terrible and the lineup as a whole symptomatic of the decline of our political class.
"There is a maximum of 60 months of benefits within one's lifetime, but some states have instituted shorter periods."
Many Americans think you can collect welfare payments, which are about $300 per person, depending on the state, in perpetuity.
That's just not true.
I still wonder where this 'welfare' system is that people think exist.
I guess I tend to come down more on the nature side of nature vs. culture, but I definitely think that the possibilities you listed are entirely plausible and I'm definitely open to being convinced with well-designed, at-least-not-obviously-partisan studies.
(Amusingly, depending on what language you use, blaming "compiler bug" first when your program crashes can actually be surprisingly credible. Languages like D, for instance, which combine a strong type system with a homebrew backend overburdened with features, make it a lot more plausible than you'd think.)
I entirely agree that neither of those are existential struggles, but we still have to rank them. Personally, I'd rather lose feminist progress than liberal progress, because a liberal, open-minded society will make it a lot easier for feminism to regain ground. What good if we win equality-of-outcome, if it loses us the soul of equal rights? I believe that we ought to think that #3 if #3 is true, and that we ought to think that #2 if #2 is true. To do this, we have to be able to discern truth without bias.
Inasmuch as #3 is true, free thought and civil discourse is its ally in whole.
It covers both sides of the story, including people who seem to be celebrating.
However, consider this: blood type is important in Asia yet most people in the USA do not even know their blood type so, we could conclude it's not important here. Now, imagine a movement to force blood type diversity took root in the American tech. Then, would it be still hard for you to picture someone who does not believe that the blood type diversity is a good in itself yet is not a "burahara"-type bigot who thinks the B-type people are inferior?
You won't actually find an argument from me that Damore didn't behave stupidly, assuming he wanted to keep his job. However, whatever debunkings might there be to Damore's memo, neither Google, nor rags like Verge, nor even Economist provided any. Economist went as low as referencing Zunger's "pathetic bleatings" that make Damore's memo look like a Nobel material. And "social science"s wounds are mostly self-inflicted -- those few arguments that were presented against The Memo came mostly from departments of "womyn's studies" where results are determined long before research starts. Just look at what happens to Peterson (his scientific bona fides seem to be beyond reproach) when he tries to speak.
Google's internal discussion groups are quite weird, but apparently inciting street violence is perfectly fine. I think it would have been reasonable for Damore to expect that a memo that at least pretends to be objective, and does not call for any illegal activity would be acceptable as well.
Shold Google have a right to fire anyone over anything? I believe so. But if they fire Damore for reasons they give, which really are complete bunk, and do not fire the "I'll punch you in the face" crowd, they are hypocrites, and might get mauled themselves in the end.
1. How is discrimination defined? Is it an excess of reports of discriminatory behavior e.g. sexual harassment, or is it a discrepancy between the general distribution of some class and the observed distribution?
If it's the latter, you're already implicitly arguing that society should have an equal distribution of outcomes.
If it's the former, sign me up for what whatever awareness campaign is going to help address the issue socially & politically. I'd truly be happy to participate in raising awareness and working to create an inclusive and safe environment for everyone (and I have supported such in the past, regardless of whether I personally think there may be an issue or not, out of solidarity). I'm willing to be proven wrong here: I just haven't seen anything that indicates SV actually has, following with the example, a sexual harassment problem relative to the rest of the world. If we demonstrated that SV observes more sexual harassment than average, I'd wonder WTF was up too and even agree with trying to _target SV_ in order to solve the problem. Where the logic breaks down for me is when we target SV and paint it as a place with rampant sexual harassment in a campaign to address a general social issue.
Speaking for socially-liberal-economically-conservative individuals for a second: we don't disagree with the ideals, it's usually that we disagree with the tactics. A minor example, say we agree ingrained and harmful social norms regarding expectations of females' role in society is causing women to be underpaid in the workforce today. Instead of demanding the regulation of salaries at a political level (a very economically liberal idea that I think plenty of people are not onboard with) we'd argue for an approach involving educating and empowering women so that they don't end up, at large, agreeing to work for numbers that are below average/market rates (I'm not blaming women, but I'm suggesting that they share some of the responsibility in correcting the imbalance because at the end of the day it is their problem).
I'm saying all this because I feel much of the issue is exactly that these nuanced topics are easily conflated, "You don't support regulating equal salaries for all? You're a sexist bigot!". Just no. It's so frustrating to hear that and it really hinders progress towards agreeable solutions for investing resources in solving issues.
2. Strategies for addressing industry-level discrimination that don't involve looking at the outputs? A few come to mind. I am a huge supporter of listening to the under-represented groups and making sure their feedback is present when developing responsible, inclusionary methods for hiring and operation. Also education. If our "American dream biased" (otherwise, capitalist) mode of operation has lead to a systemically ingrained and observed e.g. education gap, then we should invest resources in educating under represented groups specifically in creating programs that serve to bolster the industry in question.
The only thing to keep in mind is how we come to the conclusion that one industry exhibits an abnormal skew. We'll probably disagree a bit here, but I think it's okay for an industry to exhibit a general (not abnormal) "post game" skew. Whether it's females in nursing or men in engineering, I am willing to entertain the idea that it might be related to the nature of the game and less about the playing field and rules. One of the biggest arguments against the wage gap is that if a company could pay 70 cents on the dollar for female employees, men would be out a job pretty quick. That is of course assuming an unlimited supply of qualified female candidates. Regardless, either a) the industry is wildly sexist and prefers men (sexist enough that they're willing to pay 30% more on the budget sheet), or b) something else is contributing to the gap. It could be as simple as a difference in interests between genders. Especially conceding those differences could be the result of socially poisonous expectations cast upon children, I think the answer is again to focus on the pipeline.
I guess my overall point is that it's hard to come to an objective definition of discrimination. I have also realized that if you define it by the outcomes, it becomes a much bigger problem because you have to effectively control for everything in society to realize a world where we've achieved 100% utopian uniformity (importantly, it's no longer diversity). I find it more effective and productive and intellectually honest to focus the lens on making sure children are given a safe environment and equal opportunity to to explore whatever keeps their heart content. Would you not also agree it would be a problem to impose some idealistic notion of a perfect 50/50 split in gender across all industries upon children for fear of coercing them to do something they're not actually interested in due to pressure to achieve some broader fabricated social utopia? Don't take that the wrong way, I still think we need to target our efforts at building a fair platform, but it's the flip-side of the regulated outcomes argument: if you're not careful you end up discriminating all the same, just at the other end of the pipe. Let's just keep the pipes clean... social neutrality!
Your telling of the Missouri thing is highly suspect. He openly admits he made a series of mistakes in handling racism on campus and related student and faculty protests. His bosses wanted him out.
I can't find him saying anything equivalent to what you said; indeed, he clearly said the opposite. But if he did say and believe that, that's clearly grounds for dismissal, just the same as if he said he didn't believe in evolution or global warming. Institutional racism is a a well-established, well-documented phenomenon. A person denying basic facts about institutions in America can reasonably be seen as not qualified to lead an institution in America. Especially one in a state with huge racism-related problems.
TheCoelocanth already beat me to it, but this article doesn't do any celebrating about the "end of men". It's very sympathetic about how the changing US economy has gutted many traditionally-male fields. And in so far as support for Trump is driven by the economic uncertainty of men, it does a lot to explain that component. But your original claim is ridiculous. I don't have a lot of free time right now, do any of your links honestly support your argument?
He funded nakedly oppressive political activity. Passing a law to deny consenting adults the right to marry solely on the basis of their sexual orientation is oppression by itself. That Prop 8 had significant financial and legal consequences for tens of thousands of Californians is the proof that the act was overtly oppressive.
[1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/oppress
The real reason conservatives have so much trouble in liberal places is their outright refusal to acknowledge their political and social behavior is profoundly harmful to segments of society.
The solution is so, so, so easy: a conservative person should simply find somewhere else to live if they are unhappy in any geographic regions where a lot of liberals are busy using their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression to build the kind of society they want.
In any case, conservatives at large are currently working on law that will allow people to discriminate at will against people if they feel like it infringes on their religious liberty. ( In fact, just such a law has already been passed in Indiana. Signed by Mike Pence. )
So while conservatives now complain bitterly about discrimination, they're the one's busily enshrining it in laws at various levels.
Imagine if a religious liberty bill passes. In fact, I can't wait. Then I can fire all my conservative employees en masse for offending my liberal Christian religious views.
Does that help you see why this madness must end? Why no one wants it?
> Postgenocide Rwanda elected to heal itself by becoming the first country with a majority of women in parliament.
(where female dominance is described as "healing")
> In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex.
> she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.”
That's just a few quotes from the article. I agree, it's mostly neutral.
For true celebration, it's probably necessary to look elsewhere...like Beyoncé's song Run The World (Girls).
I still think that in terms of damage done Nixon was the worst we've had and Bush comes in second. Trump is dangerous in my opinion, but nothing so far comes close to what Bush did. It's strange that you make dislike of Bush sound unreasonable. It's perfectly reasonable.
* Evolution isn’t an atheist fact vs some religious alternate truth; evolution is a scientific fact.
* Personality differences (note: not to be confused with IQ or proficiency!) between male and female isn’t a conservative fact vs some liberal alternate; it’s a scientific fact.
Damore suggested we use these well established cross cultural personality differences to inspire positive improvements to the workplace that will allow women and men alike to more naturally be attracted to this line of work, and to thrive in it!
But because the scientifically uncontrovertial truths he quoted to formulate his argument are not currently considered “politically correct”, he was basically “crucified” and made an example of.
Scientific consensus is not conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, etc. Scientific consensus is the best unbiased reflection of reality we have.
Of course, any use of the words “fact” or “truth” must be qualified with the appropriate level of uncertainty — not even the best scientific establishments can reach fully 100% confidence — but may established scientific “facts” are called such because our uncertainty levels of them can become so incredibly low. The law of gravity, the claim that the world is not flat, and many others are clear examples of this.
We MUST stop politicizing the notion of “fact”, unless you really want to enter a post-truth world where unjustified opinions and feelings hold equal truth to scientific facts established with literal mountains of evidence and broad consensus.
If observing scientific fact creates a “hostile workplace” and is a fireable offense, then we have truly entered an Orwellian age of Wrongthink and Thoughtcrime, where we must all constantly police our own thoughts and utterance so as not to contradict the ideology of The Party.
He wasn’t even quoting scientific fact for hostile purposes; it appears entirely benevolently motivated, out of a desire to create an engineering culture more compatible with feminine personalities (which even many males have, as he points out!)
But because it touched a topic of political sensitivity and quotes a scientific fact that was “politically incorrect”, the truth of his argument, and even the well intentions of it, were made irrelevant. He was crucified, to make an example to all of what truths must never be spoken.
And this is why we can’t have nice things. Now we can’t even speak about making the workplace more suitable to women, because to discuss that would imply that there’s a difference in personality between women and men — and such a thing now can get you fired.
But since you don't, what exactly do you expect me to say here that will convince you in 30 seconds?
I don't agree - there is a subset of people that criticize meritocracy as a concept because they believe the idea of 'merit' is inherently racist and classist - if you start at a different level, it becomes more difficult for you to accrue 'merit' and so that needs to be balanced and taken into account. Some people believe this is much more important than hiring or promoting on 'merit'
If this is the case, then the diversity policies at big-name Bay Area tech companies often go beyond affirmative action and into the realm of outright discrimination. For example, identical resumes at my company have 3-4x chance of getting an interview if the name suggests the applicant is a woman and or black or Hispanic. You may or may not agree that "structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates" is affirmative action, but the point remains: that's what many Silicon Valley companies are doing.
Can you find any stats showing that a White male has a harder time in America getting a job, getting a loan, getting a mortgage or lease, getting into college, etc than an equally qualified non White male?
Hillary Clinton said that after the election.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-future-is-female-hillary-clin...
If we agree that's a loaded term, perhaps we can also agree that in terms of dividing people by race and gender, Trump isn't so different from many leaders on the left. He's merely the first Republican who plays the game of identity politics that the left has played for so long.
I think it's a terrible shame that the dream of a race-blind, gender-blind society was abandoned...but the left, not Trump, is to blame for that.
It was a Republican, Eisenhower, who sent the army to enforce school integration after the Brown v Board of Education decision. Nixon [often accused of this "Southern Strategy"] was Vice President at the time.
And a much higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/s409
But the Democrats are certainly good at rewriting history in their favor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ
And you have heard of Strom Thurman haven’t you?
I've also heard of the many racist Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights and remained Democrats after 1964 (many much longer), including: John Stennis, Herman Talmadge, James Eastland, Allen Ellender, Russell Long, John Sparkman, John McClellan, Richard Russell, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, John Rarick, Robert Byrd, and Al Gore, Sr.
But are you really going to defend the Party of Trump as being inclusive?
Are you really claiming that the Southern Strategy didn’t exist despite the words of Lee Atwater?
And the claim that interview with Lee Atwater is talking about Republican strategy makes no sense. It starts with "in 1954 you start out saying n....r, n....r, n....r." But in 1954 the South was solidly Democratic and Republicans were sending troops there to force integration. The quote describes a supposed "southern strategy" beginning in 1954 that bears no relation to reality in 1954. Why should we believe the rest of it when it's wrong from the beginning?
The people who write about these things always say they don't like when the word meritocracy is being used to hide bias.
But, parties change and they try to appeal to enough different coalitions to get elected. The Republican Party use to be about free trade, "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and not blaming others for your plight in life" and at least give lip service to caring about the deficit. Now they are completely the opposite.
I certainly agree that parties' political positions change. That doesn't mean any particular claim of change is true.
After that alt-right brought in their own thugs as well, which might be the ones you're referrring to.
In the antifa vs. alt-right contest both sides get a dishonourable second place.
Every politician breaks campaign promises and Trump is no exception. Now if you donate or otherwise contribute a lot of money to a candidate then they will support you. That much is clear and it does not take a lot of money. The only reason we don't have gun control is because the gun lobby has enough votes in Congress.
There is no such thing. If you want to join and meet up with other conservatives, you totally can. There are Republican party offices all over. Hell, in the middle of Silicon Valley there is the huge conservative Hoover Institution think tank.
But if you want to come to work and say a bunch of obviously unpopular things and expect that it's all just going to be cool, it's not. Work is work, everyone thinks before they say things. No workplace is different in this regard. Like the previous commenter said, work is not a debating society, it's really common for people to put up with their coworkers, grin and take it, etc. because that's how teamwork happens. It's not something only conservatives have to deal with.
Do you live anywhere near a University? Get your butt there and count how many white men there are in Professor's chairs. Then count how many of the tenured Professors are white men. Then count how many of the head administrators are white men.
Absolute delusion.
They aren't equal things though. The latter is basically you promoting the idea that people of different backgrounds aren't as welcome in the workplace. Especially if your workplace hires anyone on an H1-B or on any other kind of visa, or anyone from Iran, Sudan, Iraq, or the other Muslim ban countries.
I get that in terms of an election they are both equally valid political candidates. But the actual substance of both pieces of clothing is different. One is easily going to divide any workplace where you have employees of foreign nationalities or minorities and the other isn't. There's a reason why what you expect from both scenarios makes sense.
Look man, welcome to being an underrepresented minority / woman in the US. This is our every day everywhere we go. We always have to watch our tongues make sure what we're saying doesn't get us labelled as "uppity" or "thuggish" or "bossy" etc etc etc.
You're coming to terms with the fact that in any society you have to consider how other people will react to what you do. Congrats.
If you're dumb enough to switch how you vote on something that is unquestionably going to change your personal economic, social, and political future because someone went a little overboard in calling people racists, then you deserve to have your country decline.
I think it is because there are already places for constructive political debate. You can go there to do that. In the workplace, be civil, and if people are telling you they don't like you to do X and Y be reasonable and willing to compromise / apologize if you need to.
1) SJW isn't a bad thing, like racism. social justice (the literal term) is what all people want in their society. It's preached by nearly every religion (the idea that the poor are equal to the rich, the black people equal to the white, etc).
2) Racist is an adjective but SJW is a group affiliation often attributed to people who don't wish to be affiliated that way. A person can say a racist thing, but no one can do an SJW thing. We can qualify certain things and statements as racist or not. We cannot do the same with SJW. SJW will always be used to denigrate someone. Racist, however, can be used analytically and without malice.
That is the libertarian utopia right? Ultimate privatization, very few regulations on what businesses can do.
What world do you live in, man?
This is a hard truth for people to swallow, but no, you don't have to be mentally ill to think this. It's really easy to think murder is an acceptable option when you live in a country which is constantly murdering innocent civilians daily.
Look, I'm not a mass murderer sympathizer or anything like that. But the US army killed somewhere near 1 million civilians in Iraq alone (possibly more, this poll is from over a decade ago): https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/09/14/poll-civilian-d...
When you live in a world which routinely brushes away and rationalizes that kind of mass murder because it promotes American interests and American values, it's not hard to see why some random dude might see killing people he disagrees with as a way to promote his values.
Secondly for Thiel, there's the whole question of why on earth he would go on national TV to support Trump when he is completely outside the general demographic that Trump caters to. Trump's biggest supporters were some combination of baby-boomers (and to some extent their children), gun owners and Christians. Some of the ultra-rich may have been his biggest financial supporters and the ones that stand to gain the most from his presidency - but they are only a sliver of his actual voter base and an even smaller percentage of the American populous. By speaking out the way he did - he essentially put a spotlight on himself as someone willing to sacrifice the welfare of the people if it helps his own bottom line. He could have supported Trump indirectly and it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election. I would say the way Thiel supported Trump was especially absurd.
If all you care about is skin color you're missing my point.
wrt point #1, SJW and Social-Justice Advocate are different terms. Justice is a subjective term, the word itself may have a positive implication, but the implication of "SJW" is that their brand of social justice is neither just nor good.
I disagree with point #2 though: the word "racist" is used to denigrate (label people who do not accept the label) more than otherwise. A person can absolutely say an "SJW thing" - the kind of thing an SJW would say. This may be ambiguous, but so is racist; it depends on a personal definition of what constitutes racism just as mush as SJW does.
In fact, willfully creeping the scope of words such as "racist" to include e.g. microaggressions is partly what differentiates SJWs.
Here's another: https://practicaltheorist.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/the-myth-...
Here's a critique stating that the terms aren't defined enough to be said to be 'just'
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6818.pdf
The last one is the most fascinating, I really recommend you read it if you're interested in these things. Amartya Sen is brilliant.
How many of them were unqualified, but given the job over a more qualified woman, just because they were a man?
I'm sure there are cases of that happening, somewhere. But I can point to multiple examples in the past year alone of jobs being advertised explicitly and in writing as not being open to white men. I do not recall ever seeing jobs being advertised as not open to women.
As it is, you're pointing at a disparity and implying - but not even outright stating - that it must be due to bias, or that white men can't possibly be being attacked or can't possibly fear for their careers, merely because there are a lot of them.
Would you have made the same sorts of arguments about black slaves, on the grounds that there were loads of non-enslaved blacks in Africa at the time of the slave ships, so clearly they couldn't be that oppressed. I mean just look at the quantities. Clearly you would not have made that argument because it'd be bogus. Merely having a common attribute doesn't imply you can't be oppressed.
I described the argument as a straw man because it is one. Damore verifiably did not say he thought women at Google were inferior. I'm not surprised you're tired of people saying "straw man!" in discussions about Damore: as I note, nobody seems to be able to argue that he's wrong, so they just attack things he didn't say, and then other people have to point that out. If you dislike that, then point out strawmen yourself. Perhaps eventually people who dislike Damore's perspective will then stop strawmanning him.
I doubt very seriously that people are opposed to bringing back jobs to America. What politician has a platform of "we want to send jobs overseas"?
Ronald Reagan was all for gun control in the 60s as was the NRA when the Black Panther Party started legally walking around with guns in California (the Muliford Act). You want to see gun control? Start encouraging as many minorities as possible to apply for open carry permits.
Though I suppose it's easier to dismiss complaints about bias when we pretend those complainers just hate our meritocracy.
Of course, I might be wrong, so please feel free to show me the many leaders who've opposed globalization and the receptive responses of the institutions they work for.
There is a company called Softwear trying to brIng clothe manufacturing back to the US. But they plan to automate everything and hire a very few engineers. How does that help the “working class”?
The ship on globalization has sailed. Republicans use to believe in the free market that was back when manufacturing jobs were strong. But now that the “working class in middle America” is hurting, they like “big government” interfering with the free market. and more regulation because it helps them.
SF needs an overhauled planning process and possibly a way to fast track review of housing in already over priced areas that can contribute to a reduction in median rent.
Edit: what is also clear is that the longer we delay these changes the more A) folks will get displaced that wouldn't have otherwise and B) the greater backlog of housing will need to be built to make up for past deficit and correspondingly the greater magnitude of change to the city in a shorter time (which I agree with you should be minimized to a reasonable extent)
It reminds me of all of the issues in the Ferguson shooting. Instantly we had "Hands up, Don't shoot" and "Criminal" being called by both sides. The stuff that is divisive goes viral and people on both sides shout about it.
Alas, because it was imperfectly said by Damore, it is no longer safe to openly discuss if the gender gap in tech might be influenced by biology.
I don't know if that I am doing will go anywhere and I don't currently have firm suggestions for SF. But it is quite hard to find genuinely viable solutions that don't have seriously undesirable side effects.
I think discussing it on HN can have a constructive purpose, but it isn't guaranteed to have one. I wish I knew how to more seriously engage people trying to come up with real solutions.
My mother always said it is easy to criticize, it is hard to create. If you have any thoughts on how I can more effectively connect, I would love to hear them. You could also try connecting with me on Reddit where I created a space called Housing Works.
I'm not sure how to parse your last sentence. Could you clarify what you mean?
Women outnumber men in college by 50%, and almost nobody sees a problem with that. Men vastly outnumber women among the homeless, prisoners, accidental deaths, etc, and nobody cares about that either.
Nobody in power cares enough about less fortunate men to support any studies that might show what obstacles they face.
And the ship hasn't sailed on globalization. China is bringing protectionism back whatever we do.
Will protectionism raise prices? On manufactured goods, perhaps. But manufactured goods are a small portion of our expenses compared to rents, food, and energy, and if protectionism also raises wages it will mean more Americans can afford to live well.
If nothing is done to increase male enrollment, the statistic you quoted (% of population with college degrees) will change to match this inequality fairly quickly.
I'm sure that was a typo, but a "point by pint" list (or discussion, either one) sounds pretty fun...
I thought conservatives were against forcing people to pay taxes and "big government" and we should let the free market decide - or do they just feel that way about health care?
All wages won't rise because of manufacturing jobs. Just those for manufacturing. It's basically "redistributing" money from those who aren't in the manufacturing industry to those who are. I also thought that conservatives were against "redistribution", or are they for it when it helps "working class Middle America"?
56% to 44% as of this past fall, and projected to reach 57% to 43% by 2026. [0] That's a little over 25%, not 50%.
> almost nobody sees a problem with that.
Lots of people see it as a symptom of a major problem.[0, again]
> Men vastly outnumber women among the homeless
This is, IIRC, basically entirely because virtually the entire set of homeless veterans is male, and homeless veterans are a full third of the homeless. Again, homeless among veterans (which, again, is basically the entire source of the overrepresentation of men among the homeless) is widely perceived as a serious problem.
> prisoners
Well, white people might not care about this; but the imprisonment of black men and what it has done to the black community has been an intense concern of that community.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
Why not? Leftists want equality of outcome, right? Why does that exclude college enrollment, unemployment, dangerous work, etc?
Response to below: Would people on HN really be all over these studies? Or would they be censored as I have been?
And I just posted a study for you in our other comment chain, since you demand it so persistently. I hope you're reading these edits...
Not really, no.
Leftists are, however, less inclined than those on the opposite side of the political spectrum to dismiss wide discrepancies in outcome as being results of differences in free uncoerced choices rather than inequality of opportunity (which the right didn't even accept as a value until the left made it popular enough that they invented the "opportunity vs. outcome" argument to adopt in name while dismissing it in substance).
We've been going back and forth for days but you still haven't posted any latitudinal studies to back your claims of the oppression of the White Male. There are plenty of conservative think tanks that would have been all over studies that showed such data if it existed.
I would think that HN being full of engineers and other left brain types would actually take the time to read such studies and give them a fair shot.
We already pay subsidies for all kinds of things. Why not pay one to help the working class?
----
Response to below: I do think any injustice is immoral but subsidies aren't injustice. We pay lots of subsidies. I never said subsidies are immoral.
And don't confuse manufacturing with "rural America". There are lots of working class people in the cities who once found employment in manufacturing. Farm subsidies do nothing for them.
And if you only want to read a study (and will consider no other facts) here's a study showing men receive much longer prison sentences than women for the same crime:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002
----
> What should we "believe" other than studies?
Statistics?
Like the statistics on male victims of domestic violence vs the legal protections and shelters available to men.
Or the statistics on boys vs girls expelled from preschool, boys medicated, the number of male vs female teachers, etc.
And have you read that study yet? You seemed so insistent to read a study, I thought you might have some comments about it.
But all you have to do is post a study showing statistical evidence of discrimination against the White Male and I promise I'll read it with an open mind. I have somewhat of a background in statistics and economics and I enjoy reading about those subjects.
But if "I only want to read a study and consider no other facts". What should we "believe" other than studies? A few anecdotes? If there are some systemic issues caused by government policies - and there are plenty with the criminal justice system - I'm all for reform. Reforming the criminal justice system is about less government not more.
Do these questions come up in Presidential campaigns? Are they debated in Congress? Is there any funding to address these issues? Are there massive organized protests calling for change?
The wage gap is smaller than the education gap, and in that case the answer to all these questions is "Yes".
There are some people working to bring attention to these issues, but they've had limited success and face quite a bit of opposition.
But you haven't just been talking about unfairness in the criminal justice system. You have also been arguing that the white male is being discriminated against in other parts of society - including the education system and the labor market.
But now you are claiming that there is discrimination against men because there are fewer male teachers? Most of the studies and surveys show women make less men partially because they choose professions that are more conducive to raising a family - like teachers. Most women I know who are teachers cite that as a reason that they became teachers - because their work schedules are aligned with their children's school schedules. Including having summers off.
Again, you are pointing to outcome without showing any links to a correlation between discrimination and the outcome. If you really want to change policy based on statistics and outcome, you would be arguing more in favor of wealth being redistributed to minorities and women - no I'm not arguing that.
I'm also arguing that working class men of all races, not only white, are suffering because manufacturing jobs have left America. In fact, whole communities, men and women of all races suffering because of that. Meanwhile we see how much the presence of manufacturing jobs in China is fueling whole communities.
I think both of those factors contributed to Trump's success.
The conversation also strayed to systematic discrimination against men in education, the justice system, and social support, but I don't think this has much to do with Trump's success.
And in truth, SF’s housing policy does fall in line with typical conservative values. It protects the interests of the establishment, in this case those who are either long-term property owners or wealthy enough to buy their way in a high premium.
Typically these are studies that are trying to find bias against women, by anonymising hiring processes. Replacing names on CVs, even voice masking. What they discover instead is that anonymising hiring makes outcomes better for men not women, and then the studies and the anonymisation is canned.
Like here:
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
But there are others. There were some studies in Australia on this. You can search for them quite easily.
If not, what you just said is pure whataboutism.
It's also incorrect. People on this very page are arguing that conservative speech shouldn't be protected because of the existence of those extremists.
> “Wolfe verbally acknowledged that he cared for Black students at the University of Missouri, however he also reported he was ‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus,” a statement from the group read.
After which Wolfe appologized but people wouldn't have it. It's the mob mentality that I don't like. Once he said that there was nothing he could do to save his job even though he met most all of the demands laid before him. At that point it became about making a statement not about humans learning to tolerate each other. It's intolerance at its finest. All the politicians asking for his removal were just being political..
CEO of Papa John's is another example. And this all started with chick-fil-a's COO.
Or, we can chalk this one up to you misinterpreting the scope of events to which my initial comment refers...
If you can find studies showing - that controlling for all other variables - that white males are being discriminated against and that it is caused by discrimination, I'm all eyes.
Just like I said about the wage gap between men and women. Most of the studies I've seen reported even by places with a more liberal bent is that the wage gap can in large part be attributed to women choosing less demanding careers that allow them to spend more time taking care of kids. It's not being caused by disctimination.
Can you show from studies that the outcomes you described are being caused by discrimination?
In SF this week there's a case of a man who owns a laundromat, and would like to turn it into a 75 unit apartment building. It sounds like he met all the objective criteria and is getting stonewalled by NIMBY's due to the usual excuses: "neighborhood character" and historical value of the building. The building is a laundromat, and by all appearances fairly mundane and not at all historical. I can think of no obvious opposition a reasonable urban planner would have to this development. Yet it's being stonewalled. What undesirable side effects would it have? I grew up in New York City, which is also dense. People love living there. What's wrong with SF moving in that direction if it means accommodating all the new residents AND providing reasonably priced housing to all the current ones. Pardon the rant, this issue hits close to home for me.
Edit: Re your earlier point on SF geography, earthquake proofing is a well developed tech. It will add some cost to development, but that doesn't make it infeasible. I live in a part of the city where they had to drill many many feet down to bedrock. It can be done.
I don't remember it as clearly as I once did, but the Aswan Dam met all its stated goals of providing electricity and controlling flooding. But it cost vastly more to build than expected, silt build up was much faster than expected, leading to a shorter lifespan than expected, it caused a terrible schistosomiasis epidemic and farmers had to spend huge quantities on fertilizer. They overlooked the fact that the icky flooding provided free fertilizer in the form of rich silt. They overlooked the fact that the icky flooding is why Egypt was The Jewel of the Nile for thousands of years. They didn't recognize that the icky flooding also kept the snail population under control. The snails are the vector for schistosomiasis, a horrifying parasitic infection.
Lots of efforts to fix things go sideways. It happens all the time.
Many mainstream American conservatives refer to themselves as classical liberals, and they are correct. Liberal, in the American parlance, on the other hand covers a wider gamut, from centrists who favor technocratic regulatory regimes and government nonintervention in personal affairs all the way to progressives who favor income redistribution and widespread social engineering policies. (Clinton and Sanders camps in the Democratic party respectively.) There's also an emerging hard-right anti-immigration / "nationalist" fringe. I take no issue with your points but object to the terminology which masks the complexity of the situation at hand.
You can, however, get Damored though for expressing the wrongthink opinion.
