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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."

29 of 1,175 comments (clear)

  1. Finally by TimothyHollins · · Score: 5, Insightful

    About damn time. Let's see if the courts are as willing as social media platforms to allow racism and discrimination as long as it's against the "right" people.

    1. Re:Finally by viperidaenz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Isn't it illegal to discriminate based on gender or race, regardless of what the gender or race is?

    2. Re:Finally by RedK · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Then why are Christian bakers forced to make cakes and pay damages to couples for same-sex marriages ?

      Aren't Christian Bakers privately owned ?

      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oregon-lgbt/oregon-appeals-court-upholds-damages-in-gay-wedding-cake-case-idUSKBN1EN01V

      mmmmh ?

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

      Leak internal company documents to the media to push your SJW agenda? Not a problem!

      Submit feedback as requested after a company training seminar? FIRED

    4. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am not "the majority." I am one individual. I may fit into a demographic category that is a majority, but to treat an individual a certain way solely for being a member of any given demographic group is the very definition of the huge no-no -isms (racism, sexism) that Western society holds ideals to eliminate.

      Being white makes you a part of the "white person" demographic, but it is what you are, not who you are or what you bring to the table.

      Being male makes you a part of the "male person" demographic, but it is what you are, not who you are or what you bring to the table.

      This is true for any person-sorting adjective for demographics you can imagine. Replace "white" with black, female, Asian, Indian, African, Portuguese, South American, transgendered, whatever. None of that matters because you are not dealing with "people," you are dealing with persons, each an individual distinct from other members of the same demographic groups with a unique complex set of life experiences and world views.

      You're not discriminating against "the majority." You're discriminating against an individual person because of things that they have no control over, and an act of discrimination is a bad act reflecting negatively on the actor...regardless of who it is against.

    5. Re:Finally by rogoshen1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, they are. It is illegal in the US to discriminate based on age, race, national origin, religion, gender, etc etc.

      All the mental gymnastics in the world will not be able to rationalize how those rules should ONLY apply to women, gays, and minorities.

    6. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please provide references for "being fired for being an asshole." Last I checked he was fired because Google internally solicited opinions and ideas, he attempted to provided productive input wholly inside the company which was not widely available within the company, then someone inside Google who probably didn't like what he was saying "leaked" that paper to the world so Google (who was also being sued by some women at the time for conspiring to pay women less than men, go figure) would have to put out the fire by getting rid of Damore.

      The person who "leaked" his paper knew exactly what they were doing. He wasn't "being an asshole." You can't prove that he was. The leaker, however, was certainly being an asshole. Don't forget that Google specifically solicited Damore's input, he didn't just come out with "women tend to gravitate towards non-technical fields in general" out of the blue!

    7. Re:Finally by RedK · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What if said bakery had no employees willing to bake the cake ? Because this is what happened here. We're not talking about a big bakery with hundreds of employees, this is a simple small business run by its 2 owners.

      They also didn't refuse services or products. They offered the couple to purchase a pre-made cake, simply stating they would not do custom work that promoted beliefs outside their religious dogma.

      I know this is hard for you to reconcile. You want businesses to be "private entities, free to discriminate" when it suits you and not when it doesn't, but that's not how the world works. When you pass a set of laws, it is blind to your side of the ideological spectrum, and applies equally to all. Even when that's not convenient to your narrative.

      --
      "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
      Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
    8. Re:Finally by rogoshen1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As an Oregonian, that case really pissed me off.

      A business owner, outside of a few essential things (like housing) should have the god damn right to choose to take on a client. It's a fucking bakery for Christ's sake, in western Oregon you'd have to *try* very hard to find a religious, conservative baker.

      This was simply a case of someone who got butt-hurt over the business owner having the temerity to stand up for their beliefs, and decided to try to make an example out of the bakery. Essentially the outcome was that they lost their business, and have to pay around $100k in fines because they didn't want to bake a cake.

      A sane, rational person would cowboy up, and find another bakery that would be happy to take your money. But nope, gotta make a court case out of it!

      Fuck the plaintiffs. Seriously. Fuck Them.

      How about going to a halal butcher with a pig and demand that they butcher it for you, religious beliefs be damned?

    9. Re:Finally by StandardDeviant · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If it was just a matter of the business owners saying "no, go away" that'd be one thing. When they organized mass harassment against the plaintiffs, that's a different matter altogether, and that part seems to be missing from much of the media coverage of the case (particularly on right-biased media sources).

    10. Re:Finally by Dread_ed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The guy said that an industry that is overwhelmingly staffed by, run by, and controlled by, and designed around men, and has been for decades, might be, at a fundamental level, less interesting to women. He pointed at the parts of the industry that aren't the actual job itself as the culprits.

      He basically attacked the culture, not the work, and said its Patriarchy (without saying so) and should be updated. He attacked shameless self promotion as the major metric for advancement, working hours that cause burn out, working weekends, and sacrificing your entire personal life for the company. That's not being an asshole. That is trying to change a broken system for the benefit of everyone.

      The result? (Asshole alert, here it comes...)

      Progressive morons attacked him as a sexist. What complete and utter fools. If they had joined him we could have seen some real change in corporate America. Shortsighted and ignorant groupthink prevailed because someone with a stick up their butt was too stupid to understand his memo wasn't a condemnation of women, but a scathing rebuke of corporate America's stranglehold on the life of their workers. It's dangerously socialist when you break it down to its basics, and revolutionary if embraced. I was surprised at the reaction of those that call themselves left, liberal, and progressive. Apparently they would rather have horrible working conditions for everyone, provided they can scapegoat some uninvolved party, than good working conditions for everyone without someone to blame.

      It's this kind of crab mentality that gives me the confidence to say that politicization due to ideological self-identification is the most detrimental force in America. It turns otherwise rational individuals into helpless tools of their own enslavement. What is worse, they scream and cry as they drag everyone down with them. If you're going to destroy yourself and everyone else around you, would you at least shut the fuck up as you do it?

      --
      When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
    11. Re: Finally by Bartles · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So I guess a sign at a business establishment that says "whites only" isn't discrimination because they arent hiding it. You lefties are lefties because you failed in the logic department.

    12. Re:Finally by barakn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No shit, Sherlock. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The OP, however, distinctly referred to "the 70s," not 1964. The racist Dixiecrats abandoned the Democrats AFTER the Civil Rights Act, not before. Apparently the only method you have of pretending there wasn't a great shift of racists to the Republican party was by IGNORING THE LAST 5 DECADES OF HISTORY.

      Take a closer look at the wiki article you linked to. You'll see that both Democrats and Republicans voted heavily in favor of it, the Republicans just a bit more so. The real division is not in party, but in location. Southern (as in from one of the 12 secessionist states during the Civil War) Democrats and Republicans almost uniformly voted against it, whereas Northerners (from all other states) voted overwhelmingly for it. Also note that the South had far more Democrats than Republicans at that point, a situation largely reversed by the Reagan era. If you think that racism evaporated from the South as a wave of Republicans took control of it, you're stupider than I thought.

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
    13. Re:Finally by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Funny thing about the term "snowflake". It was coined by that book/movie Fight Club

      No, it wasn't coined, just popularized by the novel/movie. It was coined much earlier than that and it's meaning has changed over the years. In it's current usage as "someone who thinks everyone, but most especially themselves, is special and unique like a snowflake, and just as fragile", it actually started from the people who promoted the "everyone is special and deserves a trophy" mindset via "Every child is special and unique like snowflakes".

      --
      There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
  2. Re:Finally and ignorant aggrieved white person! by ScentCone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's such a relief to know that this same sort of delusional blathering is still being dished out by lefty shills. Because it's exactly what cost the Democrats nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and millions of two-time Obama voters who'd had enough of the completely fake histrionics. Even destroy-Trump-all-the-time networks like CNN have moved on past your deprecated talking points about phony felony collusion that isn't even a thing and never happened, and are now trying their hardest to talk up psychological reasons for removal from office, because that's all they've got. Please, though, carry on. Because if we want to watch the Dems fall on their faces in 2018 exactly like they did in 2016, it's voices like yours that are going to get it done. Thanks!

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  3. Re:Jerks are not a protected class. by poptix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As opposed to all the other groups protests (discrimination, wage gap, "unwelcome advances", etc) that gave everyone at work the warm fuzzies and a general feeling of unity.

    --
    Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
  4. Re:Donald Trump - White Affirmative Action by k6mfw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, a black democrat named Barack Obama

    Actually he was half black if need to be specific... There was a discussion on CSPAN3 or 2 of a book author talked about Obama and how he "walked in thin ice" about racism during his Presidency. Author said Obama was highly educated, married once and still is, two daughters doing well in school. Also well spoken, did appropriate sports like play golf, etc. If Obama was like Trump, he would have never been elected.

    --
    mfwright@batnet.com
  5. Re:I probably would have done the autism angle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What I want to know is if the person that leaked his private internal company document (that **he submitted at the request of google for feedback after a diversity training seminar**) was also fired? Because that's the person that turned it into a PR nightmare.

  6. do not settle by mapkinase · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please, do not settle for non-disclosure agrrement, not even if they offer you a billion dollars.

    --
    I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
  7. Re:While I think damore is an idiot, by RedK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He caused google to get bad press.

    No, he did not. The leaker did. And then I dare argue not even the leaker. The memo itself is tame and sound. The progressive (aka regressive) press that libeled the memo to hell and pretended it was saying things it did not say at all is what caused Google bad press.

    If anything, it's Salon's, The Verge's, Vox's and other progressive-leaning blogs and trashy "news" outlets that caused Google to get bad press. And if you want to argue "journalistic" freedom, well fine, then it's back to the leaker.

    James Damore was provided a "training seminar" (the quotes are important, because the forced diversity propaganda speech he was forced to listen to was no seminar, and it certainly wasn't training) and provided feedback, as asked, on the company internal forums, which serve this purpose.

    Do you still need further clarification of the events ?

    --
    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  8. "after a manifesto ..." by recrudescence · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It was not a "manifesto", let alone an anti-diversity one. That's what it was called in the media. Big difference.

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

    Funny, the group of white nationalists which usually echos those sentiments seems to think skin colour and gender is an excellent attribute to justify not hiring people

    Because white nationalists are as bigoted as progressives. Identity politics is cancer, from both sides.

    You know, a wise man once said :

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

    Maybe one day we'll be rid of Identity Politics.

    --
    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  10. Re:Finally and ignorant aggrieved white person! by Dzimas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It astounds me that American politics has devolved into confused name-calling and an almost complete inability to form coherent and rational arguments. Let's bring things back to reality; both major American political parties expound right wing, authoritarian viewpoints and philosophies. The only thing that differs is the degree.

    Faced with that reality, it's bewildering that half of the US population supports the elephant party, while strongly believing that donkey party followers are complete loons (and vice-versa). That's simply not a sane conclusion. Just because someone votes a certain way doesn't automatically make them a blithering idiot, nor does it mean that they're not allowed to disagree with some of the policies put forward by the legislators they vote into office.

    It's also pretty clear to anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language that President Trump is prone to frequent odd outbursts and declarations that are sometimes completely incoherent and provably false. That should be cause for significant concern, whether you're conservative or liberal.

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

    Reading the memo will only make you dumber,

    If you read it, you wouldn't pretend things like :

    His opinion being that google shouldn't recruit women because they might have on average less aptitude than men for some tasks.

    The actual quote :

    Note, Iâ(TM)m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these
    differences are âoejust.â Iâ(TM)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 donâ(TM)t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences
    are small and thereâ(TM)s significant overlap between men and women, so you canâ(TM)t say anything
    about an individual given these population level distributions.

    So yes, you can disagree, you can argue the science he used and the studies he cited are wrong, or that he misunderstood them, but trying to depict the memo as vile while not having read it is malicious.

    --
    "Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
    Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
  12. Re:Finally and ignorant aggrieved white person! by Dread_ed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Donald Trump's unhinged tantrums on Twitter are game theory. Tit for tat.

    He is merely feeding back to the American public exactly what they are putting out.

    Like your post. It is unhinged, ridiculous on its face (and increasingly so after any level of consideration), and a testament to the absolute insanity that partisanship foments. To me it looks identical to the Twitter account of Donald Trump in tone and intellect.

    In many ways this fits the description I have heard about "the government you deserve." When the electorate learns maturity, restraint, and civility we will get mature, restrained, and civil governance.

    --
    When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
  13. Re:Jerks are not a protected class. by Kokuyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm getting tired of reading this bullshit. Yeah, you'd have a case if it wasn't for google ASKING for everyone's opinion on how the workplace could be made better (whatever you want to define as better).

    Damore said "Stop acting like we're all the same. Women have things to contribute, so adapt the workplace to their needs instead of molding it for a virtual template of a unisex humanoid that does not exist".

    He pointed out what was, in his opinion, a mistake the company made and how they could go about fixing it. Only problem was reality doesn't fit Google's alternate facts.

    It's a-okay for a car company to want to run according to other laws than those of physics however when you then notice that your sales could be better and ask for input and an engineer points this out, you either go "Well, guess we can't work according to cartoon physics any longer" or you go "Dude, thanks so much for wanting to help but that really doesn't fit into our dogma. Please consider either keeping this opinion to yourself in the future or we'll be glad to help you find other employment".

    Yeah, yeah... they're not required by law to act like that but god damnit, it's the respectful thing to do. Then again, respect and ethics are not things US culture is known for comprehending.

  14. Re:Finally and ignorant aggrieved white person! by Z80a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is no such thing as "reverse racism", racism is racism, and judging people by the color of their skin is always wrong, even if your purpose is to help the person.
    There are no such thing as good racism, as you're always reducing the person to his physical features.

  15. Re:While I think damore is an idiot, by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Having read it, the only difference I can see is that my summary of it is shorter and more direct.

    Your summary: Google should avoid hiring women because they may be less apt at X.
    His argument: Due to biological differences Google won't find equally many women to do X.

    Let me try to make the argument even blunter, imagine you want employees that are over six feet tall for some reason. There are obviously women taller than that and men shorter than that, but you will find the pool is highly skewed against men. What he's saying is that great, you can hire every woman over six feet tall you can find, but you can't expect them to be half the employees because they're not half the workforce and everybody wants those that tick the diversity boxes.

    The only way you can force an artificial balance in an unbalanced pool is to pay them more so all the tall women come work for you while everyone else is skewed even more or lower demands so that women actually don't have to be so tall as men. Either way they get special treatment for their diversity, not their actual work output. And that this is unfair both to the women who did pass the same qualifications as everyone else and the men who got bumped down the list.

    Of course he wasn't talking about something as unalterable as height, he was talking about qualified tech workers. And that if Google wants more women in tech, they should spend their money on bringing up more qualified female candidates not make special rules for females. And his theory was that you still wouldn't get equal representation because men and women think differently and have different interests and values and that Google shouldn't begin with the answer being 50:50 and construe that everything that's not must be the result of gender discrimination of some form.

    Of course this offended a bunch of SJW activists that think sex is a social construct and that boys would play with dolls and wear pink tutus while girls would play with cars and toy soldiers if nobody boxed them into gender roles. There's no doubt that in many companies and workplaces there has been a lot of resistance and bigotry against those that go against traditional gender roles and I hope we'll get past that as individuals. But seemingly no matter how far equality goes there still seem to be rather large statistical differences in the career paths we choose.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  16. Re:I don't think it'll matter by dj245 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then there's the Democratic Socialists. The Bernie Bros. I don't see these guys getting anywhere. Nobody wants to pay for something else's medical care. Nobody want to pay for their schools. Sure, you can argue that such things benefit everyone (e.g. we could pay our national debt off in 10 years with the money single payer healthcare would save, look it up). But it still doesn't _feel_ right. Especially with a good chunk of the country bigoted against _somebody_. We're balkanized. We're not Americans. We're White Americans. Black Americans. Gay Americans. Christian Americans. But we're not Americans.

    You are correct about Americans being fragmented. We had a lot more overt racism and demonization of different groups back in the 1950s but at least the American Dream, national pride, and national unity was a coherent idea shared by most people (even if it was not completely true).

    On the topic of socialist policies, I DO want to pay for education of others. The children of today will be taking care of me when I'm old, and it is in my direct interest that they are not complete idiots. On the other hand, every time the government gets involved in paying private enterprises for things, costs skyrocket as people game the system. Expanding college education by subsidies or direct payments is a prime example. Health insurance is another.

    The most cost-effective government services are those run without significant subcontracting, such as the Postal service, National Parks, etc. Government should provide services either directly without significant subcontracting, or not at all. The problem with this is that private companies are well entrenched, lobby for subsidies, and oppose government-run services that compete with them. Local government-run internet services are a prime example.

    --
    Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.