Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

There is a linguistic sleight of hand at work here: 'libertarian' and 'left' is not what is happening in SV. These terms have been hijacked by the identity politics cartel.

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.

You're telling me! We transsexuals are a great example, having been co-opted in recent years to make liberals/postmodernists look good. We are just too convenient of a packaged identity now that gays are not a big deal any more. I feel for Thiel, he may be a "public person" with his commentary, but his sex life is private. Everybody knows that you are not supposed to pry (most of us just want to move on with our life), but somehow there is an exception if you are "supportive", "accepting", or "progressive", and it becomes acceptable to gossip about. They all want to feel smug about having the one token tranny friend.

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.

That's not quite correct. There are very obvious, very large common intellectual & political interests in Silicon Valley:

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.

Completely aside from this, how can you support Trump while knowing that he doesn't support you and his VP actively fights against LGBT rights?

You do realize that (1) politics is multi-dimensional, (2) trans-issues are far too unimportant for Trump to actually care about and (3) US has good enough legal system that there's approximately 0 chance that Trump can actually do anything agains trans people (I mean he can't even manage to ban foreign Muslims).

These topics all have overwhelming support in local media, PR and marketing copy, in other words in the official ideology.

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.

I don't realize or agree with any of this. As a black person, I can tell you that it's been untrue for our community so I don't think it different for the trans community.

You could believe that standard Republican policy is overall better than standard Democratic policy. Trump has been pretty conventional on actual policy so far; if you ignore the words he says and focus on the actions he seems like a less interventionist version of the Georges Bush.

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.)

Without knowing anything about the poster you're replying to, I'll take an educated guess: they're not a single-issue voter. Politics is far, far too complex for anyone to (responsibly) be a single-issue voter in my opinion.

Have you been following Trump's DoJ, and the military ban? You're simply uninformed, he can and has been doing things to harm us.

Our legal system is fragile and it's not at all clear that trans rights will win the day.

> Have you been following Trump's DoJ, and the military ban?

Or his education department? For something that isn't a priority, his Administration is acting strongly, broadly, and consistently on rolling back trans protections.

The Department of Justice gets involved in cases not just based on law but also on politics due to limited resources. They literally have to pick and choose what lawsuits they're going to get involved in, or not. The president nominates, senate confirms, the various federal attorneys general who likewise make those kinds of decisions at the local level.

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.

It seems that a lot of the proponents for relaxed unskilled immigration are also the same that decry the use of H1B visas.

What is Trump doing against blacks?