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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."

13 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 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

    3. 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.

    4. 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!

    5. 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
    6. 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?

    7. 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).

    8. 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.
  2. "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.

  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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.