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

So we should all take a lesson from how people in the Bible belt treat those who are agnostic or atheist, right? <rolls eyes>

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.

Didn't Damore receive threats of physical violence? And he's no Thiel by any stretch of imagination.

I don't see anything obvious with a quick Google search, and anybody complaining about that seems to start throwing around words like "antifa" so my skepticism and troll alerts are on maximum.

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?

Evidence in Damore's lawsuit has some rather interesting tidbits about antifa, but while they are not very nice people at all, they are not really relevant to this discussion, I think. It also has evidence of physicasl threats. Those made it to the recently dropped/dismissed NLRB complaint, and it seems (was mentioned in a thread on HM, for sure) that peple involved had received very stern slaps on their wrists.

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.