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James Damore Sues Google For Allegedly Discriminating Against Conservative White Men (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The author of the controversial memo that upended Google in August is suing the company, alleging that white, male conservatives are systematically discriminated against by Google. James Damore was fired as an engineer after a manifesto questioning the benefits of diversity programs was widely passed around the company. In a new lawsuit, he and another fired engineer claim that "employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google's employment policies and its business, such as 'diversity' hiring policies, 'bias sensitivity,' or 'social justice,' were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights."

27 of 1,175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Discrimination" against the majority is kind of difficult...

    What? No it isn't. It's simple. Here: "Thank you applicants! You're all pretty good candidates for the job, but if you're male or white we won't be hiring you." See how that works?

    --
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  2. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are "white men" a protected class? No? Then it's legal to discriminate against them. Sorry.

    Yes. A protected class includes any race and any gender. I know it really burns the snowflakes' hearts when they can't legally discriminate against white men. But, protected classes cut both ways.

  3. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
    https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/what-are-californias-protected-classes-in-employment.shtml

    Both race and sex are protected classes.
    In California, political affiliations and activities are also protected.

  4. Re:While I think damore is an idiot, by RedK · · Score: 5, Informative

    but widely disemminating such a document massively increased the chance of a leak

    Except he did not "widely diseminate such a document". He had a "training seminar" and was asked for feedback, which he provided on an internal board reserved for such discussions internally.

    AKA : he did nothing wrong at all. Google got bad press because they force everyone into "diversity training" and then don't like it when people don't think "skin color" or "gender" is a good attribute to base hirings on and lets them know the "seminar" was simply bad.

    Did you even read the memo ?

    --
    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  5. Re:Um ... by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    Protected classes. Race and gender are protected classes everywhere in the US, and political affiliation (and activities) are a protected class in California.

    I remember people claiming that DaMore was a liberal or democrat, but I guess that's clarified now.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  6. Re:Finally by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Republican Party's southern strategy consisted of embracing racism and bigotry in order to gain political power. The Democratic Party's position during this time was to *shed* its Dixiecrat racist wing by supporting civil rights.

    Except that didn't happen

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    You can see that more Republicans than Democrats supported the Civil Rights act

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  7. Re:Finally by GerryGilmore · · Score: 4, Informative

    OK, just who is being discriminated against due to gender or race? Everything that I've seen shows that he was fired for being an asshole. I sure hope THAT never becomes a Protected Class, else we're all screwed even more than now.

  8. Re:Finally by r1348 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Enter apartheid South Africa...

  9. Re:Um ... by RedK · · Score: 4, Informative

    I remember people claiming that DaMore was a liberal or democrat, but I guess that's clarified now.

    He probably is. His memo was pretty liberal leaning after all and there is a very large difference from classic Liberals (pro free speech, pro meritocracy) and Progressives (anti-speech that hurts feelings, pro-affirmative action and quotas).

    However, he was portrayed as conservative by media and probably perceived as such by his employer. As you know, classic liberals these days are being labeled conservatives simply for holding the belief that gender disparity in some occupations could be entirely the result of freewill and biological differences that may promote different interests that lead to different career paths.

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    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  10. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    And things like that are happening, at least in England. For example, the BBC did that openly in their advertising for new hires saying the positions are open only to those “from a black, Asian or non-white ethnic minority background”.

    Outrage as BBC World Service internship scheme only open to people who aren't WHITE

  11. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Damore was asked for input in a debate on diversity hiring policies. He produced a thoughtful and well researched memo in response to the quest for how to best hire people. This memo was addressed to the people within the company, specifically those on the diversity committee. The memo was not released by Damore, and he did not intend for it to leave Google.

    The asshole in this case was the person or persons that released the document publicly. That person or persons created this shitstorm. Lots of people say things in private that if plastered on the internet, and taken far out of context, that could also create bad PR for a company.

    Google fired the guy instead of standing up for him. Now they are getting sued for it. Good. They can't keep an internal memo to themselves so they deserve all the bad publicity they get from it.

  12. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Whenever a person's race is used in any way to determine whether they should be hired, either positively or negatively, then it is discrimination. That is the problem with affirmative action - it incentives the hiring of minorities, or outright sets quotas, thereby giving them preferential treatment which is at the cost of the majority, hence discrimination.

  13. Harmeet Dhillon is Damore's attorney by McGruber · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the Santa Clara Superior Court's website, Damore's lead attorney is Harmeet Kaur Dhillon.

    Dhillon's Wikipedia entry says she is the former vice chairman of the California Republican Party, and the National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California. An article from the San Francisco Daily Journal posted on Dhillon's website says she is a former American Civil Liberties board member.

    On March 9, the Wall Street Jounal reported that she was being considered to run the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Department of Justice. She apparently interviewed with both Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump, but was not offered or did not accept the job.

    DuckDuckGoing her leads to lots of articles about her politics and personal life, but nothing about how many cases she has won. I bet Google will be represented by attorneys who have spent more time litigating and less time politicking.

    1. Re:Harmeet Dhillon is Damore's attorney by russotto · · Score: 3, Informative

      Dhillon recently won an abuse-of-process case against a Berkeley Antifa leader. Sorry about the Breitbart link, but while some of the mainstream media reported the suit when it was filed, I didn't find a mainstream source for the _outcome_ in a quick search. Odd, that.

  14. Re:Finally by RedK · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is that why the KKK started out in the democratic party but vote republican now?

    Senator Robert Byrd was a democrat to the end, in 2010. He was even the "mentor" of one very popular, losing, crooked, democrat presidential candidate, which you might remember from investigations such as "Benghazi" and "E-mail servers with classified material".

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    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  15. Re:Finally by Tenebrousedge · · Score: 4, Informative

    Net neutrality doesn't have squat to do with content policing. It's also allowed to shape traffic based on congestion, and also to prioritize different protocols (e.g. VOIP over HTTP). The only thing forbidden is to prioritize traffic based on endpoint. Nice try with the victim card though.

    --
    Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
  16. Re:Finally by outlander · · Score: 4, Informative

    ....and after this, the Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party and migrated to the GOP.

    Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy in 1981: https://www.thenation.com/arti...

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    "Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
  17. Re:White Men are a protected class by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Conservative is not. As one of those snowflakes I would like it to be, but those sort of worker protections have been shot down by (ironically) white, conservative men...

    The suit was filed in California, where political affiliation does qualify for some of the employment-related protections afforded to protected classes.

    To wit:

    California law prohibits employers from making rules or policies that forbid or prevent employees from participating in politics or running for public office, or that control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees. State law also prohibits employers from coercing or attempting to influence employees' political decisions by threats of discharge or loss of employment (CA Lab. Code Sec. 1101, Sec. 1102).

  18. Re: Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Famed ultra-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond was quickly embraced the Republican party, becoming a staunch friend and ally of Barry Goldwater, joined by Ronald Reagan, famed for his speech celebrating segregation, and becoming the role model for Trump's insistence that the White Supremacist's were damn fine folks whose statues to traitors are more important than something like disaater relief for Puerto Rico.

  19. Re:Finally by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2, Informative
    You are only half right, no pun intended.

    Democrats were the party of racists back then. All those racists, including Reagan switched their parties and made Republican party the home of racists, now.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  20. Re:Finally by Pseudonym · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree, the person who leaked it should at least be reprimanded. So tell me their name.

    Unless you have reason to think that Google knows, you can't conclude "no problem".

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    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  21. Re:Let's see.... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well no, he didn't. What he said is that there are differences on average between men and women and those differences can explain why a job is not exactly 50:50 male and female even in the absence of discrimination. He also pointed out that those differences are an average for a group and pointed out there's a lot of overlap. So saying 'women on average are more X than men' doesn't mean that 'each individual woman is more X than any man'. When the fake news media reported on his report they accused him of saying that 'men can code/women can't code', but he very carefully explained this was not what he was saying. And he even drew a nice diagram of two overlapping normal distributions to illustrate this point.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20...

    Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

    He pointed out that Google's policies now discriminate against men and that there were non discriminatory ways to get more women to work there.

    But why not try reading what he actually wrote rather than what other people - who have an agenda - said he wrote. I even linked to a copy of his memo so you can verify he said all the things I said he said, and carefully explained he was not saying what you accused him of saying.

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    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  22. Re:Finally by LeftCoastThinker · · Score: 1, Informative

    Thank you, I have heard that bullshit line far too many times from Democrats trying to drape themselves in the civil rights movement, which they first fought bitterly against, and then flipped and try now to claim the moral high ground on. F---ing sick joke.

    --
    If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
  23. Re:Finally by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.

    Gotta admit, with the level of lies going on here, that is starting to sound attractive...

    Republicans switched to cater to the racists. I'm honestly not sure what the point here is, you know full well you're lying through your teeth. Do you think so little of liberals that you expect us to fall for "No, see DEMOCRATS are the racist ones!"

  24. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. He dd not publish a manifesto. The press called it a manifesto; it's not. It's an engineering style paper describing a problem and possible solutions to the problem.
    2. The paper he wrote was neither sexist nor misogynistic. After reviewing the definitions of the word sexist and misogynistic, can you specify what specifically in the paper was sexist or misogynistic?
    3. I have seen no employee rule that he broke. Can you cite one?
    4. He did not publish the paper. He submitted it to Google as asked for in response to training request for comments.
    5. I've read the paper twice. He does precisely what was asked. It provides feedback on how to increase female participation in technology without breaking the anti-discrimination laws of California and the United States of America.

  25. Re:I AM AN OPPRESED WHITE MAN! FEEL MY PAIN! by Raenex · · Score: 5, Informative

    they will roll out the HR termination paperwork documenting how he was abusing other employees because they weren't white

    Ha. All he did was state his opinion that Google's policies and culture were discriminatory. For that, HE was abused by the social "justice" idiots that rule the roost at Google, like this asshole:

    From: Alex Hidalgo <ahidalgo@google.com>
    Subject: You are a terrible person
    Date: Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 10:38 PM
    To: James Damore <damore@google.com>

    Feel free to pass this along to HR. Keep them in the loop for all I care. May as well do it early.

    You're a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.

    -Alex

    https://www.scribd.com/documen...

  26. Re:Sorry, but.... by rossz · · Score: 4, Informative

    He didn't voice his opinion publicly. He voiced his opinion in a private company blog after Google asked him for his opinion. Then someone leaked it.

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    -- Will program for bandwidth