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

> they feel people there are resistant to different social values and political ideologies

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

The argument here is that people like you label anything you don't agree with as "intolerant" and justify social lynching of the ideas based on your likely angry or frustrated emotional assessment. This didn't start with James, although that's one of the more popular incidents. Disagreeing with operational policies that are based on politically charged ideas that we need to correct for the inequalities in outcomes rather than provide an unbiased and meritocratic foundation of opportunity is not intolerance. It's politics.

No, intolerance is a specific term of art here, not just anything lefties don't like.

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."

You are right. My apologies if I implied this only happens on "the left". There's a lot of context in this thread so I didn't feel the need to caveat.

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.

I would suggest trying to use a different term than "social lynching". It is a hyperbolic word that describes actions that are quite out of proportion with what might be called "actual lynching". Loss of a specific, typically rarified, job is far less consequential than death.

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.