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Labor Board Says Google Could Fire James Damore For Anti-Diversity Memo (theverge.com)
According to a recently disclosed letter from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, Google didn't violate labor laws by firing engineer James Damore for a memo criticizing the company's diversity program. "The lightly redacted statement is written by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB's division of advice; it dates to January, but was released yesterday, according to Law.com," reports The Verge. "Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore's memo was legally protected by workplace regulations, 'the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.'" From the report: Damore filed an NLRB complaint in August of 2017, after being fired for internally circulating a memo opposing Google's diversity efforts. Sophir recommends dismissing the case; Bloomberg reports that Damore withdrew it in January, and that his lawyer says he's focusing on a separate lawsuit alleging discrimination against conservative white men at Google. NLRB records state that its case was closed on January 19th. In her analysis, Sophir writes that employers should be given "particular deference" in trying to enforce anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, since these are tied to legal requirements. And employers have "a strong interest in promoting diversity" and cooperation across different groups of people. Because of this, "employers must be permitted to 'nip in the bud' the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a 'hostile workplace,'" she writes. "Where an employee's conduct significantly disrupts work processes, creates a hostile work environment, or constitutes racial or sexual discrimination or harassment, the Board has found it unprotected even if it involves concerted activities regarding working conditions."
between men and women is illegal in this country.
When facts are deemed discriminatory, you know that ideological rot has set in.
Not illegal, just not speech that's granted special legal protection from a company disagreeing with you so vehemently that they feel that you damaged them so badly that they need to fire you.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
There you have it, diversity is only wanted in appearance, not thought.
The checks must have cashed.
Yes, they are illegal to talk about:
'the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected."
There is so much disinformation surrounding Damore.
His memo was not against diversity. He specifically included very well-researched and reasoned suggestions on how to encourage more women to get involved and make tech more attractive to them as a career choice.
Read the damn thing yourself, people.
Here's the relevant part of the decision: (https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45826e6391 page 5)
The Charging Partyâ(TM)s use of stereotypes based on purported biological differences between women and men should not be treated differently than the types of conduct the Board found unprotected in these cases. statements about immutable traits linked to sexâ"such as womenâ(TM)s heightened neuroticism and menâ(TM)s prevalence at the top of the IQ distributionâ"were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, not withstanding effort to cloak comments with âoescientificâ references and analysis, and notwithstanding âoenot all womenâ disclaimers. Moreover, those statements were likely to cause serious dissension and disruption in the workplace. Indeed, the memorandum did cause extreme discord, which the Charging Party exacerbated by deliberately expanding its audience. Numerous employees complained to the Employer that the memorandum was discriminatory against women, deeply offensive, and made them feel unsafe at work. Moreover, the Charging Party reasonably should have known that the memorandum would likely be disseminated further, even beyond the workplace. Once the memorandum was shared publicly, at least two female engineering candidates withdrew from consideration and explicitly named the memo as their reason for doing so. Thus, while much of the Charging Partyâ(TM)s memorandum was likely protected, the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.
So basically:
1. They don't buy the bogus scientific argument, which has been debunked by the authors of the studies he cited.
2. The use of softening language / disclaimers like "not all women" and "on average" don't help him.
3. He distributed the memo himself initially, expanding its audience, and should have known that such an inflammatory document would be more widely distributed once circulated.
4. People complained and actually withdraw from job opportunities as a result. Snowflakes or otherwise, there was measurable damage done to Google's workplace.
5. While a lot of what he said was protected, the statements on biological differences between the sexes (which were deemed bogus and pseudo-scientific, conclusions that the authors of the cited studies agreed with) do not enjoy any legal protection and Google was okay to fire him on over them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
... a call to clean house of the Deep Staters at the NRLB.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
"Shut up and put up, plebs."
I'm really not trying to be a dick here, but what if the social justice warrior tribe makes the workplace feel hostile to ME?
A hostile work place is pretty much exactly what the memo was about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"1. They don't buy the bogus scientific argument, which has been debunked by the authors of the studies he cited."
There is no way to make a contrary argument any more. All further discussion is prohibited to anyone who wants a job.
It's like the Catholic church saying the sun rotates around the earth and anyone who tries to say otherwise is subject to excommunication (or worse).
Damore may be wrong, but this is not progress.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Good thing that this is from the NLRB and not an actual court with actual judges.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
This particular topic aside: stop saying that. Freedom of any kind absolutely is freedom from at least specific kinds of consequences. You're "free" (inasmuch as nothing is physically stopping you) to not give a mugger your wallet, if you're willing to accept the consequences of being shot; that doesn't mean you really gave it to him freely in the relevant sociopolitical sense. You're "free" to break the law, so long as you're willing to accept the consequences of the punishment. But absence of such consequences are exactly what we mean by "free" in a sociopolitical sense. If you can be punished for doing something, then you are not free to do it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
https://www.judicialwatch.org/...
In response to an April 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, calling on President Obama to explain the NLRB lawsuit against Boeing, NLRB attorney Jayme Sophir issues a one word email response on May 2, 2011, to NLRB attorney Debra Willen, Division of Advice: âoeUgh.â
She was appointed by Obama
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
An Obama administration holdover at the National Labor Relations Board recommended last year that a case accusing President Donald Trumpâ(TM)s businesses and presidential campaign of requiring workers to sign unlawful confidentiality agreements be dismissed, according to a memo released this week.
Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in an advice memo dated Oct. 31, 2017 said there was no evidence that the agreements were ever enforced, and the law firm that brought the case, Weinberg Roger & Rosenfeld, did not file it on behalf of any employees of the Trump Organization Inc or the campaign.
I think it's safe to assume Sophir is a left winger.
Article here
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...
It's paywalled, but you can read it here
http://archive.is/1pp1R
South Carolina is a right-to-work state, and we're proud that within our borders workers cannot be required to join a labor union as a condition of employment. We don't need unions playing middlemen between our companies and our employees. We don't want them forcefully inserted into our promising business climate. And we will not stand for them intimidating South Carolinians.
That is apparently too much for President Obama and his union-beholden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, who have asked the courts to intervene and force Boeing to stop production in South Carolina. The NLRB wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state, where its workers must belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
Let's be clear: Boeing is a great corporate citizen in Washington and in South Carolina. The company chose to come to our state because the cost of doing business is low, our job training and work force are strong, and our ports are tremendous. The fact that we are a right-to-work state is an added bonus.
The actions by the NLRB are nothing less than a direct assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America. They are also an unprecedented attack on an iconic American company that is being told by the federal governmentâ"which seems to regard its authority as endlessâ"where and how to build airplanes.
The president has been silent since his hand-selected NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who has not yet been confirmed by the United States Senate as required by law, chose to engage in economic warfare on behalf of the unions last week.
While silence in this case can be assumed to mean consent, President Obama's silence is not acceptableâ"not to me, and certainly not to the millions of South Carolinians who are rightly aghast at the thought of the greatest economic development success our state has seen in decades being ripped away by federal bureaucrats who appear to be little more than union puppets.
Basically Nikki Haley criticised the Obama admin for taking Boeing to court over setting up shop in a 'right to work' state where workers don't have to join a union..
Presumably her reaction to Damore's memo was a similarly visceral 'Ugh'.
So it's not surprising she's decided that the labor rules she's so keen on defending don't appl
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;
Yes - the point in this case is that it's a very specific type of freedom that's granted by the 1st amendment. Specifically, the government can not ban you from saying things.
This wasn't the government banning him from saying anything, it was google saying "yes, you can say that, but we disagree, and feel that you damaged our image so badly that you're fired". That's an entirely different thing.
No one from a government agency put him in prison, or legally punished him in any way for saying what he said, therefore his 1st amendment rights weren't violated.
Women might be too smart to take them.
I saw this happen in Venezuela: first the ideologues pump their ideology for years, get people to fall in love with their romantic left-wing utopia where human nature dosn't really exist and is a product of society and can and changed at will with enough enthusiasm and—if that doesn't work—good old-fashioned repression. As long as government is not on board the "harmelss" ideas spread and do not cause that much damage. Eventually authorities are elected that are ideologically compromised and we end up with an authoritarian left-wing dictatorship.
To deny human nature and the findings of science is to deny ourselves understanding that can lead to improvement of our collective quality of life. But if we prefer to be sedated into ideology and expect science to always reinforce our already-established value systems we will just deepen our miseries and do a disservice to ourselves and future generations.
I read Damore's memo. There is nothing there that disagrees with modern psychology. The findings he refers to have been discovered by psychologists and sociologists from prestigious institutions using sound methodologies. We better accept the information that science gives us and decide how we'll organise incorporating rather than denying the uncomfortable bits. Science doesn't tell us how to be moral, it just tells us what is. It is up to us to find meaning and fairness within the context of what is, and not fall into the trap of thinking that what ought to be is what is. The Universe doesn't need to follow our moral convictions du-jour.
The memo declared for "Natural differences explain sexist results"
Legally, no choice but to fire Damore with prejudice
I should also add that the Labour Board was at pains to point out that they don't accept imagined or spurious slights, the harm, discrimination and disruption has to be real. They cite other cases where people have been disciplined after making bogus claims of harm, and that in this case they judged that his memo wasn't just triggering snowflakes or whatever.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
Unfortunately, no matter how many times you say it, there are a trove of idiots that just don't get it. Freedom of speech allows you to express yourself without criminal prosecution, but that's about it.
You know nothing about it. Freedom of speech has a very specific legal meaning in America.
Unless, of course, the author just said that to avoid being driven out of academia for heresy.
1. They don't buy the bogus scientific argument, which has been debunked by the authors of the studies he cited.
2. The use of softening language / disclaimers like "not all women" and "on average" don't help him.
It absolutely amazes me people are still trying to make everyone believe men and women are the same physically and mentally. That they think and care about the same things and all differences can be explained away by environmental pressures. This is plainly false to everyone and everyone knows it. No study or research required. It is a plainly obvious fact. Girls like girl shit and boys like boy shit. It's just the way shit is.
Damore was fucking trying to get more girls interested in boy shit by making boy shit more like girl shit and you people throw a conniption fit... HE WAS TRYING TO HELP...
Where is all the outrage over segregated men only and women only events at the Olympics? WTF is with that if everyone is equal? Yea obvious men and women are not equal nobody really believes that. They are different.
What underwrites all of this are cults of crazy leftists yearning for a post human world disconnected from any and all evolutionary pressure... a world in which there is no S.E.X. and everyone is made to be the same. That's really what you lunatics want admit it... you will stop at nothing to bend perceptions of reality to fit into your pre-warped ideology that only makes EVERYONE miserable.
This particular topic aside: stop saying that.
No.
Not just no, but fuck no.
Seriously with friends like you, free speech does not need enemies.
If speech is inconsequential then it's barely worth defending. It's only as important as it is because it has not just consequences but massive, important consequences. With a gun you can kill a few people. With speech, you can topple an empire. You know, liberty or death and all that shit.
Freedom of any kind absolutely is freedom from at least specific kinds of consequences.
Yes, and that consequence is literally only not going to prison.
That consequence is not people saying "you're a dick, piss off I don't want to talk to you any more", whether or not you agree with their assessment.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you can be punished for doing something, then you are not free to do it.
You are perfectly free to do it, and then you will receive your expected consequence. In the US legal frame, that consequence will not be criminal prosecution. Didn't you learn that in grade school?
Exactly. No one wants to hear the truth. I don't know why neckbeards hate women so much.
Federal labor law doesn't make political speech a protected class in employment.
California law, however, does.
His lawsuit is going to be a lot more complicated than the news media (and most people who read it) can comprehend.
There is no way to make a contrary argument any more.
You don't get some sort of right of first dibs simply by speaking first. If your argument is not sound, people don't have to come up with a rigorus rebuttal to the central premise of your thesis, they merely have to point out where your argument is unsound.
Otherwise, the burden is always massively on the second person. You're basically absolving the first person of the need to make a coherent argument.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
How is it possible to perform a rigorous study with the hypothesis that there are inherent gender differences?
Is there no science because the hypothesis is incorrect, or because the science cannot be objectively performed and peer-reviewed?
It seems we'll never know.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Do we need a scientific argument to explain neuroticism in females? It is a self evident truth that is backed by research. So where is the "debunked"?
Except that is what our best research says.
"Facts are inflammatory"
Why? If women are the same as men, women withdrawing and being replaced by men shouldn't be a problem should it?
Except this is bullshit. Would you like me to explain the birds and bees to you before we get started on sexual dimorphism and evolution? Damore was arguing for more female engagement in the workplace and you are a shill!
Unless, of course, the author just said that to avoid being driven out of academia for heresy.
This is threading closely into the "begging the question" territory.
I'm actually a little disappointed. I was hoping that Damore's lawsuit might see decades of social study and feminist theory rigorously tested in court, or at least used to make some good arguments debunking his arguments which are fairly typical of the stuff we see on the internet quite often.
It won't come to that though. The memo's attempt to justify itself with science was so catastrophically botched that it basically debunks itself. It will get shredded in court, if this even gets that far. The best we can hope for is for the authors of those reports to give evidence against Damore, because it will be both interesting and hilarious when he is forced to either be lectured on his mistake or effectively argue against himself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Unless, of course, the author just said that to avoid being driven out of academia for heresy.
Your argument is edging awfully close to:
If they agree with me, they're right.
If they disagree with me it's only because they're too afraid to agree.
Literally nothing anyone could say would change your opinion. That is not a rational position to take.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you stand up at a city council meeting and just start making fart noises and won't stop, they are going to throw you out, and good riddance. What they can't do is throw you in jail for it.
Play Command HQ online
No, I am not absolving the first person.
Given that the second person has a massive burden, it behooves us to give him/her an opportunity to state a case.
But you are not only enacting a "massive burden", you are also erecting further barriers by shutting down discussion.
Sounds like you are scared your beliefs may be found wanting? If you are confident, then welcome opposition in the knowledge that you will be strengthened.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google. One that I hope comes back and bites them in the ass.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Without any kind of government persecution, but you're right. There are even exceptions for that, though, when it comes to endangering people or even just being a public nuisance. Heck, copyright is a restriction of free speech.
Play Command HQ online
Was trying to find ways to fix the issue. Modern feminism does not want the issues fixed. They want to remain victims because that gets them a free lunch. Hence this was stomped on as harshly as possible.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The memo tried to find ways to fix the problem. That is something modern feminism cannot tolerate (hence the extreme response). If they lose their victim-status, what do they have left?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Damore will win in court or settle for more than he could have earned in a lifetime.
1. The citations are there to support his point of view. Even if you disagree with the facts presented in those articles or the conclusions drawn from them by Damore, he was clearly doing due diligence and tried not to make unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the problem. He was certainly more scientific than the opposing claim that a lack of equal representation is evidence of discrimination.
2. He does not use "softening language", but explains that an individual's abilities and desires do not contradict a statistic difference. There are stronger women than me, but statistically, women are weaker than men, and this is not controversial at all. The individual's strength does not contradict the statistic.
3. He was officially asked for his opinion, repeatedly.
4. The toxic environment was created by Google. You have read the quotes and screenshots and know how people treat opposing views at Google, all through the ranks. The memo is benign, on its own, but certainly in comparison to the vitriol from other people. It is however not a good cultural fit, I'll grant you that. Too reasonable.
5. He was asked for his opinion, not for a scientific paper. He even supported his opinion. It may be that Google just asks for opinions to filter out people who disagree with the ideological position that Google requires of its employees, but you will find that this is not an acceptable way of conducting a business. You can't fire people for doing what you asked of them.
The PC (Politically Correct) police can fire you, it is official.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
I'm actually a little disappointed. I was hoping that Damore's lawsuit might see decades of social study and feminist theory rigorously tested in court, or at least used to make some good arguments debunking his arguments which are fairly typical of the stuff we see on the internet quite often.
Courts of law are not venues for determining facts.
Define "nasty things", please.
And while we're at it, please define "hostile" as well.
Right now, as I see things (and please correct me if I'm wrong, with arguments if possible), both those terms are very loosely defined, boiling down to "anything that fits one's agenda".
I really want those defined and clarified, it would help a long way making workplaces a better environment.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
And how are we supposed to come to truth and really decide it's "bogus" when we're not allowed to reason about it or debate it without losing our jobs for it? It's very obvious nothing he said or did had malicious intent. Are we going to legislate "truth" like Poland soon too? That's not how critical thinking works and not how science should work. Nothing about this was remotely harassment if someone is being reasonable. He had no agenda except to improve Google and have a more fair world in a real sense. That type of thinking is basically antithetical to being a good person honestly trying to understand the world outside of just political lenses (there are huge financial incentives to promote PC btw, including the existence of a lot of human resources jobs - essentially a parasitic appendage that wants to constantly justify itself). He came to the "wrong" opinion from his research and the price was his job. That's the truth of it. I think even the study authors are so afraid they will be next that they feel forced to distance themselves rather than face those so intolerant of other views that they'd use any means to silence inquiry.
Given that the second person has a massive burden,
No the second person doesn't. The first person has at least as much burden otherwise can "win" simply by speaking first the most.
But you are not only enacting a "massive burden", you are also erecting further barriers by shutting down discussion.
Since you appear to believe that insisting that people actually argue a valid point is shutting down discussion, I do not believe we can have any sort of productive discussion since our worldviews are so vastly at odds.
If you are confident, then welcome opposition in the knowledge that you will be strengthened.
I shall now engage in reductio ad absurdum. If your argument leads to absurd conclusions then your argument is flawed.
I'm also confident (to pick a topic very close to my heart) that Jews are not evil and do not deserve to be gassed. That does not mean I welcome opposition to that point.
Your agrument leads to the conclusion that I should welcome opposition since I am confident. Your argument has absurd conclusions. Therefore it is flawed.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Courts of law are not venues for determining facts.
Yes they are. You might argue that they are not good venues for such but one of their purposes is to establish facts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Freedom of speech only applies to state actors. Google is not a state actor. If the police hears me call you a N** whore, they are not allowed to arrest me for that (of course they msy make up things). However, certain laws proscribes certain actions, ie. sexual harassment in the work place. Walking down the street, I can call you a N** whore and it be legal. If I am your boss and say the same to you sufficiently to make for a hostile workplace it would be illegal. If the police say it to me and I can establish that was part of why he stopped and frisked me, then it would be illegal.
Fight Spammers!
"women should belong in the kitchen" is not an argument, it is a opinion on what should be allowable for women. It should be dismissed on the basis of the right to autonomy. And it is not amenable to scientific study.
The statement "In general, women are happier in a kitchen than in a laboratory" is also an opinion. It may or may not be correct, but it does not take away autonomy. And is is amenable to study, which should be reproducible.
But the studies of gender equivalence are not allowed to be reproduced.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I see a lot of commentary in these Damore threads suggesting that everyone who leans left politically must believe that the irrational, authoritarian form of progressivism is the way forward. Similarly, others are accusing defenders of Damore's memo as being regressive neckbeards.
It's not that simple nor is the argument along the line of political leanings. It's about speed and collateral damage.
Nearly a decade ago, the Tea Party Movement began its own irrational and loud stranglehold on conservative politics. There were loyalty oaths and identity politics. The Republican party is still trying to re-discover itself and its integrity having sold itself to the more ignorant side of populism.
Today, following almost the same exact playbook, there is a very vocal minority of the liberal-leaning part of America who is choosing activism over advocacy, punishment over education, and change now without consideration for collateral damage. Again, the face of irrational populism peaks over the the horizon.
These are the same beasts with different goals. Both are repulsed by the long-game of social change. They refuse to accept that society changes at the speed of generations. They don't want to accept that engineers are grown from a young age, not simply given jobs. They don't care that reducing deficit first comes with a better-educated populace and thus a better workforce. They want what they want NOW. They want to show short term gains because all will be damned if they didn't make their mark on this world before they shuffle this mortal coil.
But then there are the mature conservatives and the mature liberals who know that it simply takes time to coexist and progress together. It takes time to convince people to compromise and it takes time for those who refuse to compromise to die off. And when you force try to force people to change under threat of loss of loss of livelihood or try to shoe-horn in a solution that benefits the very few without consideration for the many, you will get widespread resentment, rebellion, and reaction. And the cycle will continue.
Or we can simply teach our young parents that they should foster the spark of nerd they see in their daughters as they would an ember in tinder instead of immediately reaching for the Barbies and pom-poms. They should step in to prevent the mockery of nerds, gamers, and computer users so that there is less social resentment harbored by those who choose to be so engrossed in the loving blue glow of a monitor. And then allow those better-adjusted, better-educated, and more equitably educated children grow up and show their actual demand in their chosen fields of work.
Or we can just keep trying to force it and fighting about it.
I didn't express a personal opinion. I just observed that when expressing an opinion (any opinion) that goes against orthodoxy becomes a firing offense it becomes hard to know what anyone actually believes.
1. They don't buy the bogus scientific argument, which has been debunked by the authors of the studies he cited.
Personally, I think that the Myers-Briggs studies he brought up were awful, but I don't think that was his fault. Have you actually read them? If he made mistakes, or if his information was outdated, you correct him. That's how we resolve differences. Some people can't be corrected, that's true enough, but honestly, I don't think that was the case for him
2. The use of softening language / disclaimers like "not all women" and "on average" don't help him.
No, those were quantifiers, not disclaimers.
And unlike President Trump for instance, Damos used quantifiers pretty well actually. Many feminists could learn a thing or two from him instead of using absolute quantifiers, or instead of using no quantifier at all.
3. He distributed the memo himself initially, expanding its audience, and should have known that such an inflammatory document would be more widely distributed once circulated.
He distributed the memo inside an official working group of ~8 people. He didn't expand the memo behind that. Others did it for him.
4. People complained and actually withdraw from job opportunities as a result. Snowflakes or otherwise, there was measurable damage done to Google's workplace.
Not to mention men.
I guarantee you that far many more men stopped applying to Google than women after their reaction to Damos.
But you see that is the problem; those things are never defined, and the people in charge of the definitions tend to use them more politically and socially, While pretending it's all in the name of compassion
Define "nasty things", please.
And while we're at it, please define "hostile" as well.
See, here's the problem with this: Harassment is inherently subjective. The same thing can be enjoyable to one person, and ruin another person's life.
That's why (to pick one example) all sane legal frameworks say that, unless it is over some clearly objective threshold to begin with, it's not illegal/fireable unless it continues after you've been asked to stop.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
You still don't even know what my opinion *IS*
What we're really saying, then, is that nobody has the "freedom" to work for Google.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
This is a clear case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", though.
Whatever you think of the memo, whatever you think of Damore, there is no getting around the fact that after it became a public shitstorm, the consequences of letting him stay were always going to be objectively worse than the consequences of firing him.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
1. That should not matter, the science was published, and the conclusions he took from it are a valid conclusion, so to the best of his ability he was stating fact, normally THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH. The fact that some of the publishers (not all not, some actually said his interpretation was correct) since backpedaled on their own research is hardly Damores fault. You are not required to be CORRECT in all interpretations, just to have not presented things you know to be false - this is LONG established - otherwise everyone would be required to be THE leading expert in everything they said - which is obviously impossible.
2 - Why not? Because you want to change what he was saying? He made it clear he was speaking of averages and trends, not absolutes - and then is getting punished as though he stated absolutes.
3 - He (amongst others) was asked by his employer to write their thoughts on the subject and publish them to a specific internal location - he did exactly as requested by his employer. He is no was distributed it further than that - where is the punishment for those who did? Why is he being punished for following instructions of his employer?
4 - Why is that his responsibility? Google asked people for their thoughts, he did exactly as asked. The fact that they did not like the response was not his fault - perhaps they should have had a process in place to vet submissions if they didnt want such opinions.
5 - Why not? They are very well known science, and the fact that they may be unpopular amongst some at present does not change than, neither does a backpedal on published research by some of the people involved (but, importantly, not all, and not the leaders in the field) does not change that. He published information that was at that time publicly published in respectable scientific journals - why should he be punished for repeating such content?
The situation we are creating here is one where someone can get punished for repeating publicly accepted (by peer reviewed journal publishing) information in a way their employer asked them to, because the employer felt embarrassed about it after the fact. Think about the ramifications of that for a while.
Also note that NO action was taken against him at the time he followed the instructions of Google - in fact it was only taken after a 3rd party made this information public. THAT, above all else, should indicate that Googles actions are blindingly wrong.
The NLRB isn't a scientific body. They're not remotely qualified to rule on the science.
We live in a world where people argue "that's racist" instead of "that's incorrect" and think they're making a point.
You are anti-science and you don't even know it. We cannot have science without the freedom to inquire.
We're going to become the next South Africa at this rate.
If you think this is about a few malcontents saying nasty things about female coworkers, then it is you who is making the workplace hostile.
OK then, I'm calling. What do you think my opinion is?
This is how freedom dies, by redefining what it is.
Freedom of speech is not just a government law, it's also a cultural value. When people or organizations don't support or tolerated dissenting opinions, then they are unambiguously against free speech. If the culture doesn't support a particular freedom, the legislation won't be far behind.
Arguing otherwise reminds me of the old Polish joke: In Poland we have freedom of speech. In America you have freedom after speech.
There is no way to make a contrary argument any more. All further discussion is prohibited to anyone who wants a job.
The last time I heard that, it was about climate science. The time before that, it was about evolution. It wasn't true either of those times, either.
Here in the real world, if someone can actually disprove the prevailing wisdom in some academic field, it would make their academic career. History is full of examples, especially in fields where non-academics are convinced there's a grand conspiracy to prevent it from happening.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
No, this is the Hundred Flowers Campaign in a corporate setting. Google sought feedback from participants of its interpretation of what diversity training should be, but didn't like the critical feedback they got, and so retaliated. The Hundred Flowers Campaign , also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement, was a period in 1956 in the People's Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime. Differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong: "The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science." ...
After this brief period of liberalization, Mao used this to oppress those who challenged the communist regime by using force. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
OK then, I'm calling. What do you think my opinion is?
Sure, I'll show you mine if you show you me yours.
Here's the hash of mine:
84b0769ecea58f7740bfcc93aa7fa96df6f3d9893263c9eabc64bdc14d1cc483
mine is now set in stone. You post the text of yours and I'll post the text of mine matching that sha256 hash. This way we can both state what we think without chainging it from the other person going first.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That should go down in history as one of the famous quotes.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
There are no rules anymore, just political agendas. Either pretend to like it, or enjoy being unemployed.
Nearly a decade ago, the Tea Party Movement began its own irrational and loud stranglehold on conservative politics. There were loyalty oaths and identity politics. The Republican party is still trying to re-discover itself and its integrity having sold itself to the more ignorant side of populism.
I know what you're saying, but I think you're missing some of the history before that. The rise of populism is a reaction to the kind of Straussian fundamentalism that took over conservative politics a few decades earlier. It's hard to say when this really "began", but the place I'd identify is the Powell Memorandum of 1971. It really picked up momentum in the aftermath of Watergate.
In the late 70s, fundamentalists started hostile takeovers of conservative institutions such as the NRA and the Southern Baptist Convention, and eventually the Republican Party.
The populists have a point. It may be ignorant and irrational, but it is a reaction to the kind of heavy-handed paternalism that had already ruined conservative politics.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It isn't in society's interest to ensure that Damore has a job like it is for convicted felons. We often don't allow employers to ask convicts whether they've been convicted, because if the convicts can't find a job they may turn to stealing or murder for hire in order to support themselves. If Damore has to steal or murder to feed himself, then we can throw him in prison, and society is no worse off.
And it's not like embezzlers or murderers make for a threatening work environment. All co-workers and employers are as pleased as can be that they're supporting society's best interests. The most important thing is just for us to remain consistent.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Only as long as google continues to play the socjus game. If they did nothing and let the paper sit there and collect support/criticism like any other, it would've eventually blown over. Too many corporates are bending knee to this shit. They need to stop. It's costing them money and damaging society as a whole.
He was invited to give input and he did so.
Google pretended to want a conversation, then fired him when it got one.
Bunch of cowardly bullies.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, if a boss tells an employee to warm the bosses car up and the employee lights the car on fire ....
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The 1st Amendment exists inside the realm of free speech, not the other way around.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Another point in his favour is that he was saying that there are better ways to make the gender balance more equal than 'illegal discrimination'
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. ...
Suggestions
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
My concrete suggestions are to:
De-moralize diversity.
* As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."
Stop alienating conservatives.
* Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
* In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
* Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Confront Google's biases.
* I've mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.
* I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.
Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.
* These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.
If you say that you agree with what your employer is trying to do but they way they are doing it 'incentivising illegal discrimination' and suggest legal alternatives that makes you a whistleblower. CA has a whistleblower protection law -
https://www.workplacefairness....
Could Damore claim under it? I'm not sure. If I were him I'd try though.
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;
Truth is harmful to lies. Truth tellers are harmful to liars. Liars say that the people they've told lies to are suffering on account of the speech that truth tellers have spoken.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Okay, well if you keep saying it then THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.
Get how your threat isn't actually protected speech? Freedom of speech absolutely does protect you from people harassing you and attempting to get you fired. The only intended consequence of freedom of speech is: more speech. If you create a hostile environment where, people do not feel able to express what they feel or think, freedom of speech doesn't really exist then.
You know how most people would agree to not bottle up ones feelings? Society is the same, it's best to let ideas be open and out there, like it's healthy to find a good way to express oneself. You can't be that opposed to the marketplace of ideas, because it is the same marketplace that allows us all to have an opinion on anything, and when people come along trying to suggest that the best way is through a restriction of that market, government or not, we all lose.
Yes they are. You might argue that they are not good venues for such but one of their purposes is to establish facts.
No they are not. Their purpose stated or otherwise is irrelevant to what actually occurs in the real world.
Yes they peddle in objective evidence however it is an adversarial system mostly unconcerned with objective reality and people doing the deciding have zero domain knowledge which means court fact finding expeditions often devolve into opinion shopping and which side is best able to manage perceptions and often language itself to get their way. Courts are never about an honest attempt by all concerned to find truth and they most certainly do not adhere to any kind of scientific methodology.
Well shit it looks like people at the NLRB didn't read the actual memo either. Damore had written specifically against forming stereotypes based on differences in population distributions because of their overlaps.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
It's bitztream the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating, Slashdot editors-hating Slashdot troll!
No. If they sat there and did nothing, they would face liability under the civil rights act for allowing a hostile work environment to exist for a protected class. And even though they are still statistically underrepresented, there are many thousands of women working at Google. There's only one James Damore. The math is fairly straightforward.
Imagine all the people...
The phrase "freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences," deliberately and pointedly oversimplifies a problem that is much more difficult than a few words. If you can expect your life to be ruined extrajudicially for exercising your freedom of speech, then by default, it does not exist in a practical sense for the vast majority. Only those who are independently wealthy will be able to exercise the right, and for everyone else it will be a cruel mockery of a right. The rest will be able to speak when they express the "correct" ideas.
This is worse than not having freedom of speech at all, because it provides the illusion of it while at the same time destroying it for the common people. And that is what we effectively have in this case, and in a lot of other cases.
Punishment does not need to be issued from a judge's bench or a firing squad to ruin a life, and your practical contempt for free speech and desire to make it effectively an imaginary construct lends little credence to your judgment of who is or is not the enemy of free speech.
If you can be punished for doing something, then you are not free to do it.
You are perfectly free to do it, and then you will receive your expected consequence. In the US legal frame, that consequence will not be criminal prosecution. Didn't you learn that in grade school?
Incurring a penalty is the polar opposite of being free to do something.
You are free to go sunbathing, you might get a sunburn.
As other comments have pointed out, you aren't understanding U.S. free speech. Employers by default have the liberty to fire you for any silly, petty, reason they choose. That is the default. There are exceptions based in various laws about protected classes and scenarios. This judgement was about how this case didn't qualify. In general if your boss doesn't like how long you let your hair grow out, they are well within their rights to fire you for nothing more than that.
- occasionally long haired hippie freak
If you create a hostile environment where, people do not feel able to express what they feel or think, freedom of speech doesn't really exist then.
Can you point to me where in the constitution this particular right is enshrined? I'm having a hard time finding it in my pocket copy.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Incurring a penalty is the polar opposite of being free to do something.
Honest, this is a stupid argument. I doubt you're actually this stupid, so you should probably be ashamed for attempting such a pathetic line of reasoning. The First Amendment gets you off the legal hook for most forms of speech. That's all it does.
You know better.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I think that if you lay traits out on spectra, you'll find two bell curves with a great deal of overlap, one representing women, another representing men. Much of that may be a matter of socialization, but that doesn't make it not exist.
None of that is a value judgement and none of it grants an overall superiority to either gender.
Damore made too much of that and made a few poor word choices, but then many people read a LOT more into it than he actually wrote.
But perhaps more to the point here, what he wrote wasn't hostile, nor was it anti-diversity. Right or wrong, he seemed to genuinely want to foster more diversity. He did not release it outside of Google and shows no sign of intent that it ever be read outside of Google. Interestingly, as far as we know, the jackass that published his essay for the world seems not to have been penalized at all.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
and if your shitshow forces the CEO of a multi billion dollar company to cut short their european vacation and return home to deal with it... well you should have your resume ready. There will be consequences.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
UK TV channel 4 news inadvertently produced a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 viral video around this topic.
Social justice's long march through the institutions: reeducate the young and impressionable, stack all the committees, and take over all the positions that administer the rules. There really aren't that many people who are hard-cord social justice nutcases... but a few determined people can wreak havoc, and it doesn't take much institutional pressure to shut people up, which was always the point. It's all for your own good people!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I think the claim is that by refusing him to state his opinions in the same way other employees do, Google is creating a hostile work environment. If you allow a political agenda drive the company, then any opposition to it is creating a hostile environment in both environments. Basically Google said "we're all liberals here" and Damore said "no I'm not". The case surrounds the issue that Damore was creating a hostile environment for all the liberals and vice versa.
How about we keep politics of any kind (gender, race, government etc) out of the workplace. Also, replace all your workers with robots to achieve that goal.
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Are you white and male? Then your opinions and feelings are invalid.
So if pseudoscience is not protected, what is Google basing its decision on? If you're going to say that he's scientifically been disproven, please provide the biological axiom that keeps women out of tech?
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Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
Let the mob rule begin!!!
Problem is, groups of people are really dumb, and do terrible things, for terrible reasons. And furthermore, they cannot tell that they're being dumb. From their point of view, they thing they're doing the right thing. This is the dynamic behind many historic tragedies. And it is precisely what you're advocating for. Because, you know, your team is right!!!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
My son's grade 12 teacher lined the kids up based on how well they did in their last year of high school math class. The top 5 were all girls and 3 more were in the top ten. This is based on a fairly standardized curriculum. Next he lined them up based on their results from the university of Waterloo math contest. 22 kids in the class and the top 8 were all boys. The girls new how to write the tests and give the answers expected but it was obvious that the boys actually understood the math better. (the teacher is no longer teaching)
Here are the math contest results http://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/c... you will see a Cynthia on the 6th page of the results. That's the first woman's name I recognized
The guy wrote a memo boiling down to a statement about half of Google's workforce being unjustly hired. Even if you decide to ignore the sexist undertones in his memo, how could Google possible expect him to properly function in an office environment again?
The world is filled with good coders. Good workers are more of a rarity.
>"Labor Board Says Google Could Fire James Damore For Anti-Diversity Memo"
And thus, misinformation continues to flow. His memo was not "anti-diversity." A correct title could be:
"Labor Board Says Google Could Fire James Damore For Memo About Anti-Diversity Program"
"Labor Board Says Google Could Fire James Damore For His Memo Criticizing Google's Diversity Program"
Clearly this isn't true however. Regularly courts are able to make legal rulings based on it, and in this case companies able to make legal decisions based on it. That means, its well defined. One thing working in courts taught me is that where something IS poorly defined, the first thing that happens is a judge defines it. Then it is clearly defined.
DIscrimination laws and the like are often very long and complicated precisely because defining the terms are important.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
He didn't make original claims, he cited peer reviewed journal articles! If citing scientific journals (even ones later found to be wrong) is disruptive then we need to be disrupted. I'm not worried about damore, he is set for life on the speaking circuit, but all those people stuck in these companies who are afraid to speak their mind make me sad. My workplace is the opposite. If it was found you voted Democratic you would be ostracized. It is a megacorp, but in a sector with conservative selection bias. I have friends who are liberal and they feel they can't mention opinions at work and I hate that for them.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The rules are simple:
1. Fuck you, plebs
2. You have no rights
3. You lose
4. Bow before the nomenklatura
5. Fuck you, plebs
I guess that's why the current regime needs a repressive police state to maintain its grip on power.
NLRB are stooges of big business, responsible for giving a veneer of "lawfulness" to the predations of capital against labor.
So no surprise here: Stooges be stoogin'
Why do you hate freedom?
It's not a hypothesis, does your wife have a penis?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I've read multiple places that the studies he cited have been discredited, sometimes by the study authors themselves. Still not sure I agree with the firing, but judging by the ruling's contents it wasn't just a knee jerk reaction. AmiMoJo already covered the details further up this thread, but it's not fair to say this is just folks ignoring facts.
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protecting political speech. I was really expecting this to fall under those laws. I don't know a lot about them though. They might still get invoked in a lawsuit though.
I don't agree with this guy, but it make me nervous to think he was fired for political views. Still, the labor board's ruling is public and revealed a lot about Google's thought process and reasoning behind the firing. It doesn't seem to have been a knee jerk reaction but was done in response to the furor and uproar the memo caused combined with him sending the memo around intentionally. The ruling implies he was stirring up trouble and knew it. But that's hard to say. I suspect their be a lawsuit. If Google settles we'll never really know, but if it goes to court I suppose we'll find out.
I will say this, I've heard tales of companies trying to do shady firing practices in the past. The stories go that as the employees in question were being walked out HR got wind of it and literally ran out and begged them to take their jobs back. And this is not in a State known for strong labor laws like CA. HR reps take unlawful firings very, very seriously. I think Google dotted those i's and crossed the t's here. Meaning if the lawsuit does happen it's going to be very interesting.
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which is one of the scariest things to come out of this century. There's been a general eroding of scientific thinking that started with Climate Change deniers and anti-vaxers and seems to be spreading. Somewhere along the line people started acting like all ideas are equally valid. Science itself is partly to blame, because it never likes to use words that make things sound certain even when it is. Richard Dawkins has lengthy writings and videos on the subject.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In the UK girls overtook boys in maths at school over a decade ago.
Exactly when they stopped testing accrued competence in 2000. When they returned to an objective competency test in 2017:
A-level results 2017: Boys overtake girls in top grades for first time in years
Some 43 per cent of male maths candidates scored an A or higher, compared with 41.1 per cent of girls.
it's a very specific type of freedom that's granted by the 1st amendment. Specifically, the government can not ban you from saying things.
NOPE. The first amendment specifically prohibits against the government " abridging the freedom of speech "
That means the freedom of speech may not be abridged IN ANY WAY AT ALL. ---- that includes abridging by cancelling or changing laws on the book that protect free speech to weaken its protections --- that includes causing mechanisms to come into existence other than outright banning you from saying things, for example incentives or penalties for saying certain things.
In this case there are protections that go beyond the 1st amendment itself: The Section 7 Rights of the NLRA.
There's no element in these rights that allows one to say "speech deemed harmful or discriminatory" by someone is excluded from these protections.
These rights prevent an employer from firing or retaliating against certain speech, And because this level of protection has been established ---- it would be unconstitutional 1st amendment violation for the NLRB or the Courts, or Congress, or any other body to attempt to re-interpret or Curtail these protections so as to abridge free speech rights previously enjoyed (Based on current Politically-Correct /Politics obsession of Google).
Nonsense if laws where well defined then you wouldn't need courts to make a ruling, and you would never get an appeal court overturning the laws. Courts are able to make legal rulings because they are people. People are capable of coming to conclusions from 1 minute of news article, it doesn't mean that their conclusion is right. Take for example people not even reading the article on slashdot. When have you ever heard of a ruling where the judge says I am just not sure of what the law is so I can't make up my mind?
Making something long and complicated very rarely makes it clear, the longer and more complicated something gets the more open to interpretation it gets.
In the end of the day courts are just a few people making a judgment on what they interpret the laws to be.
The firing of Damore over a controversial memo going public says much about Google's considerations and priorities regarding their employees - if you get caught publicly holding an unpopular opinion, would you want to be working for somoene who can be easily pressured to dismiss you, or would you prefer to be working for someone who actually values you?
It depends on the opinion, whether it's merely unpopular or something bigger, and the means in which the world found out.
Not all unpopular opinions are equal. If a climate science denier or young-earth creationist worked for Google, and they decided to tell the whole company about it in a memo, citing misunderstood academic research in "support", we wouldn't be having this conversation. The particular brand of pseudoscience that Damore was using to support his argument may be less popular, but it's still just as damaging to Google's pro-science, pro-evidence, pro-reason reputation.
Both Pichai and the LRB essentially made the same point, in different words: A lot of what Damore said in the memo was fair comment, good debate material, and legally protected. It's only the pseudoscientific stereotyping that crossed the line.
He could have written a much better memo which came to the same conclusion about Google's corporate culture, but didn't.
To be fair, it's possible that he didn't because he couldn't. Hiring someone who hasn't completed their postgraduate degree (and hence hasn't completed their research apprenticeship) for a research position is always risky. If you then accidentally tell the world that you don't know how to understand a scientific paper, that's a bit of an own goal. If Damore can find someone who values that in an employee, good luck to him.
And if people who are willing to make pseudoscientific claims in public or even semi-public feel nervous about whether they are valued at Google, that might be for the best.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The burden is always on the person who wants to change the status quo. Cause, in a tie, the status quo always wins.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
they say he disseminated it out to a wider audience knowing it would stir up trouble. Also knowing that it would likely be leaked outside the company. Basically, he was shitposting on a sensitive topic.
Now, you can argue he didn't intend to do that (in fact that's exactly what you're doing) but that wouldn't be the conclusion of the labor board. The labor board disagrees with you.
For my money I don't have enough information. I'd want to know what happened with the document after he wrote it. Who did he share it with. Who actually leaked it (if that's known). Did management talk to him about it and ask him to stop disseminating it because it was having a negative impact on the work environment? Did they follow their own internal procedures in that regard? Did they have procedures for shutting down these kinds of discussions when they cease to benefit the work environment? Just because Google started a conversation doesn't mean they can't stop and say "Hey everyone, sorry, we shouldn't have started this conversation, OK? So let's just stop and go back to work".
I want political views protected. But I also agree that the workplace isn't where politics should be debated. Yes, it was kind of bone headed for Google to start that conversation (especially in a male dominated workplace where it's likely to be a sensitive topic). But mistakes can be made and then corrected in a way beneficial to everyone.
I don't have nearly enough context to say if the board's decision was right or not. I'm guessing this will go to court as a wrongful termination lawsuit. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
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> This wasn't the government banning him from saying anything,
Not interfering with a company to do the things the government can't (or wont), but would never allow internally, is different how? It's legal theater. In other matters, the government appoints a czar and pulls areas into purvey for "regulation" or more menacing, "enforcement" (Homeland Security). The retreat into a constructionist view has done nothing but encourage and promote injustice, while adhering to the letter of the imperfect law while allowing groups and committees, formed under the auspices of the public interest, to fill perceived power vacuums in the interest of private parties (although sometimes the public is served well) or outright protected private parties when behaving against the public interest. When intellectual honesty is punished and intellectual dishonesty is rewarded, in say...politics, isn't it in the realm of the same wrong? I believe that the 1st amendment was worded sufficiently, when a broad interpretation was used or, worse an ignorant one. That time has passed.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Lick that police state boot!
beelsebob opined:
This wasn't the government banning him from saying anything, it was google saying "yes, you can say that, but we disagree, and feel that you damaged our image so badly that you're fired"
I think you have misinterpreted Google's reason for firing Damore. It wasn't about him "damaging our image," but, rather, about his memo creating disruption in the Google work environment.
The things he said were guaranteed to start flame wars on internal Google email systems, to polarize co-workers - not just Damore's immediate co-workers, but people in entirely different departments, or even different divisions of Alphabet, to whom his screed was forwarded - and to incite hostility and resentment between employees of a company that famously strives to provide a supportive and inclusive work environment. That, in turn, hampers productivity, impairs team function, and creates a toxic environment for people who are, after all, being paid to work for Google's benefit, rather than to engage in water cooler fistfights and flip the bird at one another over their cubicle partitions.
That's why he was fired. Not because Google's management disapproved of his opinion, but because his memorandum, in fact, disrupted the Google workspace and got in the way of Google's other employees doing their goddamned jobs ...
Check out my novel.
Lick those corporate boots!
Better analogy:
Boss tells employee to warm up his car. Employee goes out to the car and turns it on to warm it up.
A gang of co-workers see this and become inexplicably enraged. The coworkers start rioting and burning down buildings. While loudly shouting that God, the law, and almighty SCIENCE are on their side.
1. They don't buy the bogus scientific argument, which has been debunked by the authors of the studies he cited.
Actually, no, they did not.
We are in a position now where a group of lawyers and administrators are deciding what published scientific research can be cited and what cannot.
The "authorities" found that Damore was legitimately fired with barely any investigation into the cited papers, and you agree with the authorities, yet when the authorities found that gamergate "victims" were faking threats against themselves (the FBI report after they investigated Wu) you held firm that the FBI were ill-equipped to investigate a threat.
You think a bunch of lawyers can rule on what is science and what is not, yet a bunch of trained criminal investigators are not fit to investigate crimes.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Looking at the labor board's decision I'd say it's pretty clear that the people who ruled against Damore made up their minds based on the faulty reporting that claimed the memo said something along the lines of "women can't do maths" and other fabrications. This is pretty clear from how when they had to base their decision on what's actually in the memo they chose the mention of women being more prone to neuroticism, which he backs up references to scientific studies, and the mention of male IQ being more unevenly distributed, which he also backs up with references to scientific studies.
Particularly the latter scientifically-backed point is so benign that claiming it's somehow sexist makes it clear that the labor board just went looking for stuff to be offended over and when they couldn't find anything genuinely offensive they went for the closest thing. A board that makes it's decisions based on bad information and then rather than changing it's mind when having to examine the actual facts has some serious serious issues.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
If he'd prefixed the memo with "Allah (PBUH) says ..." you'd be supporting him 100%.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google. One that I hope comes back and bites them in the ass.
Why?
See point 3:
https://medium.com/@yonatanzun...
Google did not start this, but they needed to end it, rather than spending months and months bleeding into the water. You might think I'm over-hyping that, but we're out here talking about it almost a year later! A company can't afford to let that kind of thing burn out of control internally.
Well shit it looks like people at the NLRB didn't read the actual memo either. Damore had written specifically against forming stereotypes based on differences in population distributions because of their overlaps.
The NLRB called such quantifiers defining the scope and context of what he wrote "softening language" (although how one could possibly construct a meaningful argument regarding real-world problems without quantifiers puzzles me). The NLRB knows what Damore *really* meant [nudge-nudge, wink-wink] even if he wrote the exact opposite and cited multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies from multiple sources to back it up.
What an evil genius Damore must be to have written a cited memo that to most of us means what the words and citations say, but actually means the total opposite. Thank goodness we have people like the NLRB to tell us all that the memo actually means the exact opposite of what it says repeatedly and emphatically throughout.
Keep a wary eye on facts folks...many are apparently misogynistic, bigoted, and 'hateful' on their face.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If Google had done nothing they would have opened themselves up to hostile workplace and discrimination lawsuits. The Labour Board memo makes that clear.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The research that Damore cited doesn't say what you and he think it says. The authors of those studies have publicly stated as much.
The mistake both you and Damore made is that while there are differences between men and women that are backed up by that research, the CONCLUSION you are drawing from those differences is not warranted. The differences are so small as to be irrelevant in this context and certainly not able to explain the gender gap at Google.
There's no point arguing with me about this, you need to take it up with the authors of the studies that Damore cited. Because unless they recant and beg forgiveness every court is going to cite them as evidence that Damore was just flat out wrong. In fact it's worse than that, because the only possible explanations are that Damore deliberately mis-represented the science or is too dumb to understand it.
Why are you, by the way?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Some people can't be corrected, that's true enough, but honestly, I don't think that was the case for him
Check out his Twitter feed. Even after the authors of the studies he cited debunked him, and people tweeted those debunkings at him multiple times, he just doubled down on his mistake.
He distributed the memo inside an official working group of ~8 people. He didn't expand the memo behind that. Others did it for him.
Strange that so many people on a tech news site don't seem to understand how computers work. If you send someone a file, you can't stop them sending it to someone else. Well, you can try, you can add DRM or something, but Damore didn't. As the Labour Board points out, any reasonable person would have realized that circulating the memo, even to just 8 people, meant it was out of Damore's control and, given its inflammatory nature, likely to be shared further.
He was working at Google at the time, a company that builds products around sharing stuff. The whole culture at Google is to share, via internal mailing lists and forums. He was sharing his memo... But somehow it's other people's fault that it was shared.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I said:
I believe you think Damore is right and there's a witch hunt against him. You
think that people are disagreeing with him because they are scared to do
otherwise.
Now,
But perhaps more to the point here, what he wrote wasn't hostile, nor was it anti-diversity. Right or wrong, he seemed to genuinely want to foster more diversity.
Possibly, but being misguided to the point of damaging is ultimately about as bad as if intent is there.
He did not release it outside of Google and shows no sign of intent that it ever be read outside of Google.
Sure but in his own words at least accodring to one interview he watched, he kept showing it round to more and ore and more people until he stopped getting reactions he didn't want (those being either people ignoring it or telling him it was bad without going into specifics).
If you take an incredibly contraversial topic, weigh in and keep doing so until you get a reaction then even if you're incredibly naive it's going to blow up in your face and if's pretty much your fault.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You seem to have mistaken "conservative" for "capitalist running dog". These days the latter tend to self-identify as "progressive".
I really dislike useless stereotypical descriptions.
You can be conservative and want more government regulation. You can be progressive and want less government regulation. An individual can be conservative on some issues, progressive on others, and want more or less government regulation depending on the issue.
People and their views are a little bit more nuanced than "left" and "right".
Quite.
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And freedom of action is not free from consequence. I.e. Google's action may attract a negative consequence. The courts will decide.
"The court" didn't rule on anything. A single person, Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB’s division of advice, decided in an analysis that “the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.”
Basically, without actually providing any counter-evidence to dispute any claims made by Davore, she dismisses his claims as discriminatory and of a sexually harassing nature.
The letter proper is the following link.
http://apps.nlrb.gov/link/docu...
Men will regain their position when they start successfully slaughtering and torturing their enemies to death; as they used to do in the past.
The man was the ruler because he ruled.
Now he is ruled because he loves life and fears losing it.
You might say "I am not oppressed!"
Can you have a child bride, as promised to you by the God of the Jews?
No. You are oppressed.
You are ruled over by women and their children for the good of women and their children (society).
You are a (wage)slave for the woman's system, and you gain absolutely nothing for yourself.
We are in a position now where a group of lawyers and administrators are deciding what published scientific research can be cited and what cannot.
We've been there for ages - it started with climate change. The data is noisy and there are multiple interpretations but the left decided anyone citing anything but the most apocalyptic predictions - which conveniently provided a justification for the sort of policies they wanted anyway - was A Denier Of The Science.
Admittedly even with that it didn't get quite to the point of having lawyers and administrators decide what could and could not be cited, and that's a new low.
Oddly enough Noam Chomsky made the same point when he defended Faurisson, a Holocaust denier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A professor of French literature was suspended from teaching on grounds that he could not be protected from violence, after privately printing pamphlets questioning the existence of gas chambers. He was then brought to trial for "falsification of History," and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it. Later he was beaten practically to death by Jewish terrorists. As of now, the European and other intellectuals have not expressed any opposition to these scandals; rather, they have sought to disguise their profound commitment to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine by following the same models, trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies.
Now I'm no fan of Chomsky - his record on Cambodia is awful - but he's got a point here. Actually he's pretty critical of identity politics too, albeit because it is based on race and gender and not on class. I.e. he's a old school Marxist.
Mind you class based organisation allows right wing populists to trounce left wing elitists, so maybe it's not all bad. Also I think Chomsky's of a generation on the left which is about to be no platformed en masse for their heresy.
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;
Implicit in your argument is that other people should have their freedom of speech curtailed because criticism might discourage you from expressing your opinion.
In other words you only want freedom of speech to apply to people who agree with you and never hurt your feelings.
If you want freedom from consequences your only option is to speak anonymously. Weirdly you seem to know this, Mr AC.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's a fact. How can a fact be harassment?
In the interest of balance, I'll point out that men are overrepresented at the lower end too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your argument appears to be that Google was required by law to muzzle Mr Damore's political speech. Yet somehow this outsourced political repression is ethically superior to direct political repression. 'Cuz private property, I guess?
Classical Liberals are LITERALLY HITLER!!!!2!!1!!!
Dontcha know?
It's not a political issue. Damore lost because he drew his own conclusions that are not supported by the studies he cited. The Labour Board aren't going to believe him over the authors of the studies.
Exactly the same thing will happen in court. Just watch.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google.
It is literally the only thing they could reasonably have done. Damore painted them into a corner with his unsupported statements, as the Labor Board review makes clear. The only person in this story worth being upset with is Damore, because if you actually agree with him, you should be upset with the incompetent and irresponsible way he expressed the views with which you agree; he set those ideas back considerably with his hands of ham.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes they are. You might argue that they are not good venues for such but one of their purposes is to establish facts.
No they are not. Their purpose stated or otherwise is irrelevant to what actually occurs in the real world.
Nobody said their purpose was to CREATE facts, but to FIND them. Your response only fits the other thing.
Courts are never about an honest attempt by all concerned to find truth and they most certainly do not adhere to any kind of scientific methodology.
Truth and facts are different things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You still don't even know what my opinion *IS*
Why bring up a possibility unless you believe that it's possible? Nobody does that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In a way, you're right. I for one like clear and unambiguous policies, even those I don't agree with. That way, people who defend and implement moronic policies can't weasel out of this fact and have to take personal responsibility for it. It does make me happier.
"Tell the truth" is not a synonym for "blurt every little half-baked thought that enters your head".
There are some opinions I hold that I don't tell my mother because I'm pretty sure I've missed some crucial detail and this would make me look like an idiot. One of the most important lessons, possibly the most important lesson, in all of critical thinking is to be your own harshest critic.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
We are in a position now where a group of lawyers and administrators are deciding what published scientific research can be cited and what cannot.
You know who they asked which scientific research could be cited in this case? The scientists who did the research. They said no, the court accepted their clearly expert opinion. And this is where your argument completely breaks down. You and your ilk claim that Damore's paper was scientifically sound, because it cited science. But the people who did that science say that he didn't understand what they were doing, and that he therefore was not citing their work correctly, but to try to make it prove something it doesn't prove. So in fact, he didn't support his argument by citing a scientific paper! He tried to, and failed. He made a citation, but he made it in error. And he came on like a hard-on with his conclusions, telling people what they ought to do while he is not qualified to do so. He operated above his pay grade, and in doing so, he failed badly and caused a problem for his employer. There is no reasonable scenario in which this does not result in dismissal.
TL;DR: If Damore had been smart enough to tell Google how it ought to treat women, he would have been smart enough not to do so. QED, he could only be fired.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
With this liability in mind, is this really, ultimately, NOT a 1st Amendment issue? A genuine question here.
I think that a good fraction of people advocating for free speech are doing nothing of the sort: they're merely advocating for license to be a jerk.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So his political speech was in fact muzzled by law. Thank you for clarifying that.
The burden is always on the person who wants to change the status quo. Cause, in a tie, the status quo always wins.
Er yes I think that's probably true, but I don't think it applies to what I was saying. It's much easier to say something short and inaccurate than it is to thoroughly rebut it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But the people who did that science say that he didn't understand what they were doing, and that he therefore was not citing their work correctly, but to try to make it prove something it doesn't prove.
I cannot find a reference to that anywhere. Please, feel free to link a reference to the cited scientists who refuted Damore's essay.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I cannot find a reference to that anywhere. Please, feel free to link a reference to the cited scientists who refuted Damore's essay.
No, because there have been many many links like that shared in the many many discussions about this on Slashdot already, and if you don't know about them it's because you don't want to. It's also one of the things explicitly stated in the report by the Labor Board. Your ignorance is willful and giving you this information would be a fat waste of my time. Your request for information is disingenuous, but if you actually have decided you want to know, learn to Google like everyone else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I think this bears repeating. Reading the NLRB's decision, and also reading between the lines of Pichai's memo, the consensus seems to be that Damore's comments about politics and Google's corporate culture were absolutely 100% protected free speech. It's really only the pseudoscientific stereotyping that got him into trouble.
By way of analogy, say that someone "supported" their argument about Google's corporate culture by claiming that women are less suited to engineering for reasons of phrenology. Perhaps this hypothetical individual pulled out a bunch of papers about measurable skull differences between men and women to make their point, even though the papers did not support phrenology and their authors (like all good modern scientists) thought phrenology was bunk.
I honestly don't know the limits of first amendment jurisprudence. Hell, I'm not American. It seems to me that political beliefs must be protected in a democracy, and beliefs about corporate culture and procedures must be protected under labour laws, but especially in a company that crucially depends on its research competence, espousing the kind of pseudoscience that causes a hostile work environment feels like it's on the other side of a line to me, at least as far as employment goes.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm not American either, just wondering. For the record, I'm actually against the existence of so-called "protected classes" and believe that a company should have the right to fire for whatever speech it dislikes, but when a company is coerced into this directly or indirectly by the government, it stops being a private issue.
an if not, then what is it? do you have anything helpful to add in case that initial test fails?
please tell us, what IS it about?
With an NLRB packed with Obama appointees, we are reaping the fruit of political correctness. The legal machinery has now decided that protecting women's feelings is more important than freedom of expression. America is disappearing quickly, and will vanish entirely if we don't push back.
I cannot find a reference to that anywhere. Please, feel free to link a reference to the cited scientists who refuted Damore's essay.
No, because there have been many many links like that shared in the many many discussions about this on Slashdot already, and if you don't know about them it's because you don't want to.
You don't post a link because it doesn't exist, and you know damn well that it doesn't exist.
It's also one of the things explicitly stated in the report by the Labor Board.
That's funny - I don't see it in there; maybe I'm reading the wrong one - can you give me a link to the report that you are reading?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Possibly, but being misguided to the point of damaging is ultimately about as bad as if intent is there.
Damaging? How so? Did he force HR to change their policies? Did he fire someone? Did he get someone fired? Did he cause anyone to not be hired? Did he cause a small child to cry inconsolably because someone on the internet was wrong?
Sure but in his own words at least accodring to one interview he watched, he kept showing it round to more and ore and more people until he stopped getting reactions he didn't want (those being either people ignoring it or telling him it was bad without going into specifics).
So he sought feedback, perhaps critique or dialog? How is that wrong? Can you point me to the interview?
I chose to post this part as a seperate message so the discussion isn't muddled. I believe it is apparent that my opinion was not what you thought it was. You were quite ready to shut down dialog by a process that was dangerously close to a strawman simply because you were (apparently) unprepared for someone not in lock-step with Damore to believe that the subsequent events were an amazing over-reaction.
Given your own opinion that it was right to fire Damore, can you really not see why someone who agrees even somewhat with him might feel that they had best keep quiet or even jump on the fire Damore bandwagon?
So the take away from this is probably not going to work in SJW's favor. As a business owner, I would not hire someone whom I feel is a legal risk. Next time some SJW type comes in for an interview, that would be a GIANT RED FLAG.
Have a look at my actual opinion vs what serviscope_minor thought it was. My simple belief that the author might be concerned about a vast over-reaction to the simple statement that there are gender differences does not mean I am in lock-step with anyone or that I agree with someone else's conclusions.
You apparently didn't anticipate that possibility either, which tends to reinforce my point here.
Are you white and male? Then your opinions and feelings are invalid.
That's obviously wrong, and stupid. Everyone's opinions and feelings are valid. Well, everyone's feelings are valid; opinions can be invalid if they contradict facts (of course, facts seem to be malleable of late, which complicates everything).
But, it's worth thinking about how and why that ugly notion that white male feelings are invalid arose. It is a direct result of white men essentially arguing that the opinions of women and minorities are invalid. That doesn't make it right, but neither is it right to discount the feelings of others.
It goes like this (just an example; there are a million versions): A woman feels sexually harassed when a male boss makes a sexist joke, so she complains. The response that it's not big deal is a none-too-subtle statement that her feeling is invalid. When called on this, the male boss is confused, because it really is no big deal to him. He didn't mean to offend or belittle, he just thought the joke was funny and can't see why she's bothered by it. It was just a joke. So, the woman says (with some justification) that he doesn't understand because he's not a woman and so doesn't get it.
This is the origin of identity politics (which is a conservative thing just as much as a liberal thing, BTW). It's a widespread error, that comes from a broad truth. It really is the case that people can easily misunderstand the viewpoints of people who are different from them. However, it's also perfectly possible for people to make an effort to empathize, and to succeed to a significant and useful degree. It's also possible for people to refuse to make the attempt. In addition, it's also possible for people to exploit the difficulty of understanding another's feelings to their own advantage, pretending hurt where it doesn't exist. And it's possible for people to assume that real hurt is being faked when it's not, or even to pretend to believe it's faked even when they know it's real, again to gain advantage.
But all of that nuance is complicated, and there are significant numbers of people who will refuse to even attempt to navigate it.
However, my core point is that whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., you can do the world and yourself a big favor by realizing and acting upon the fact that everyone's feelings are valid, even if they don't make sense to you! If you're in a position where your own class is dominant, you should also realize that your opinions and feelings carry inappropriate and unfair weight, due to your relative power, which means that you should make an effort not to ride roughshod over people with less power. If you don't, you're an asshole.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So yeah you've posted this same claim several times now, all without links to back it up. Last time someone actually linked to rebuttals, I tore them to shreds for strawmanning, nitpicking irrelevant details not related to the controversial parts, and responding to things not in Damores paper... why do I get the feeling this is going to be like that. Odds are they didn't want their papers associated with this nonsense, so did like everyone else: misstated something Damore said then knocked down their straw man.
You're nuts. First thing I did was make sure my kid _didn't_ go into engineering. Then again I'm in the States, and virtually all our manufacturing base is gone. The H1-B visa program doesn't help matters either. Without that base there's damn few jobs. If you're really, really good you can get something, but if you just competent you're boned. At my company we've got several engineers... in the accounting department. They know enough math and besides they've got college degrees so we hired them.
My kid went into medical and I made sure she did. I did that because Doctors have a Union (the AMA) that looks out for their members.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not at all - it's you that's trying to redefine freedom (at least in America). In America, Freedom means "you're free to say it" and "google is free to react to it any way they please". That's how American freedom works.
If you want to be protected from evil corporate overlords being mean to you (and I wouldn't blame you if you did), you need Europe's version of freedom, not America's.
You guys, the same idiots who said bakers have the right to refuse service to gays, are the ones now saying Google should be forced to let declared mysognists stay on there staff? Unless you are a racist, you cant be against affirmative action while saying companies dont have the right to hire or fire who at will.
More focus on HR, not just the answer to every workplace problem but also the cause. The special snowflake that thought up the idea of a mandatory opinion survey should be deep fried and mailed to Alaska. Wait, on second thought, fry the lot of them.
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
You're a petty jackass who posts link that don't say what you claim and then throws a tantrum when people point that out.
If you are part of a class of people who have clearly enjoyed hundreds of years of unearned benefits, like me, Iâ(TM)d imagine being a brown woman and STFU. If youâ(TM)re not trying to be a dick, thatâ(TM)s what ya do.
If you manage to feel that persecuted as a white guy, that feeling youâ(TM)re experiencing is really just you finding out that you and your dad are assholes, sorry. Deal with it and learn to be a better person.
So can the right-wing fascists. Welcome to the real world, snowflake.
As opposed to all of your arguments which are universally: If they agree with me they're right, if they disagree with me they're woman hating alt-right nazis.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Except for, yknow, the many experts who've explicitly said his science was spot on. The ones multiple people have linked you to multiple times (myself included) which you continue to throw down the memory hole and pretend don't exist.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
James Damore needs to activate his white male privilege.
That will show 'em.
Hey sjames, don't waste your time with serviscope_minor. He's a professional douchebag who is incredibly arrogant and enjoys taking people's posts out of context and starting arguments. If you don't believe me, just read his past posts...HUGE douchebag.
If you are part of a class of people who have clearly enjoyed hundreds of years of unearned benefits, like me, Iâ(TM)d imagine being a brown woman and STFU. If youâ(TM)re not trying to be a dick, thatâ(TM)s what ya do.
A bunch of white people create a narrative about what being a "brown woman" is like then insist that you don't think or feel for yourself, you just adopt their narrative. Also by race and gender "brown women" have the absolute lowest suicide rate, white men are at the top, if you just count women white women are at the top of theirs. I fail to see why it would be a good idea to put aside my own thoughts and feelings in favor of a narrative crafted by a bunch of white people masquerading as "what all brown people think".
^ Hey look at that, *you* are making the workplaces hostile and unsafe by declaring thought crimes, while pretending it's someone else.
He voted for Bill Clinton?
Some people might think he's talking about Trump. Trump never said he actually did that, he said he could do that and it's true. Just ask Harvey Weinstein. A guy that actually does that and way more. Even has the Democrats protect him by donating large sums of money to them.
If you manage to feel that persecuted as a white guy, that feeling youâ(TM)re experiencing is really just you finding out that you and your dad are assholes, sorry. Deal with it and learn to be a better person.
A Narcissist's Prayer That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it. "You're (certain race) so you deserved to be treated like shit"
It's not a political issue. Damore lost because he drew his own conclusions that are not supported by the studies he cited. ...
It would be useful if you had expanded on what your point is. What conclusions are not supported by the studies? Did you actually read them? If you did I'm disappointed that you didn't outline them here.
Could it be his conclusions were right on? Maybe you didn't understand the studies? Probably.
... ...
Or we can simply teach our young parents that they should foster the spark of nerd they see in their daughters as they would an ember in tinder instead of immediately reaching for the Barbies and pom-poms. They should step in to prevent the mockery of nerds, gamers, and computer users so that there is less social resentment harbored by those who choose to be so engrossed in the loving blue glow of a monitor. And then allow those better-adjusted, better-educated, and more equitably educated children grow up and show their actual demand in their chosen fields of work.
First off, what's the difference? Conservatives believe in change from within. What can I change within myself to make things better? Liberals think that they only way to change things is with a whip or barrel of a gun. You must do this or pay a big fine, go to jail or they'll shoot you. All of these shooters are leftists/socialists.
The part I quoted - you can't do that. I have a daughter and I know a lot of engineers all the way up to Rocket Scientists that had daughters. It's a free country. They often decide that they don't want to do the hard work. Science is tough after all. Lots of learning, lots of math and if you screw up people die. That's the harsh reality. Engineering a bridge, building, rocket or software that controls an explosive plant or concrete mixer. Screw up and someone is dead, or a whole bunch of people are dead. Men go into these fields because we have to. I certainly wouldn't have my high paying job if I weren't pushed into it at a very early age, spending all of my time studying and doing whatever it took to become educated and very marketable. Maintaining the high paying job isn't easy either. Every year they re-evaluate my performance to determine if they'll keep me. High blood pressure, Kidney Stones... and so on and so forth are the result. Most women don't have things like that.
Yup. If you can't fit in a corporate culture, then set up your own business or join a small business. I know of multiple small businesses where Demore's statements wouldn't have been an issue. Hell, at one small company I know of someone was making jokes about pedophilia in in company wide broadcast channel and no one cared.
But at a big multi-billion dollar corporation you lick the boots, keep your trap shut, don't send sexual, racist, or pedophilia emails company wide, etc. And right or wrong, if you piss off the CEO, your days are numbered.
Especially in an "at will' state which all the anti-union forces thinks are so great until someone they like gets arbitrarily fired.
And it's fucking amazing how all the anti government libertarians suddenly line up demanding the government protect employees from business when someone they like gets axed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I tell my wife she's sexy in front of anyone.
Judging by your standard, I should be able to tell any female co-worker she's sexy, in front of everybody.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you are dealing with secret information at work, you shouldn't talk about it in front of your family... but wait, according to you that means you shouldn't talk about it at work either.
Impasse.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Sure: any compliment. Because it might be misinterpreted.
Last week a female coworker was complaining in the cafeteria that her ass got fat during the month of January. That's exactly what she said: "my ass got fat, I need to lose weight". A male co-worker looked and said "I don't think it's fat, I think it looks amazing."
See, to me, it's nothing out of the ordinary. It's simple conversation, nothing to it. But the male co-worker could have been fired, if the female co-worker would have gone to HR and complained. How do i know? Similar situations did occur in the past, at my workplace.
I'm not saying I would be surprised, as a matter of fact I would have expected it, which makes me be and act unlike myself, out of fear of being fired for no good reason whatsoever except inadvertently pissing off a female co-worker. And that's why we need clearly defined boundaries.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Sorry man, I am not the one defining them, so there's a very good chance my happiness isn't considered.
What they would accomplish though, is remove subjectivity from the workplace. And that, indeed, makes me happy.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The NLRB female lawyer who majored in history dismissed the science, it wasn't actually unsupported. Did you only read the version of the memo Gizmodo used when it first published the story, with all the scientific citations stripped out, in a not-at-all-shocking display of journalistic integrity from a Gawker-owned blog. The science in his paper was sound, as everyone actually examining the claims in the paper instead of what people are pretending is there had to admit (AmiMoJo keeps posting that the authors of the papers Damore cites are saying that he's wrong, but that's based on a couple quotes in a Wired article that don't support his contention, see my post here for details).
The person to blame for the shitstorm is the one who took the internal discussion and made it public as part of a smear campaign; yet no action was taken against that person.
This will ultimately advance his ideas, as it's made a big show of how far progressives will go to silence scientific debate and unfairly smear anyone who questions their methods even when the outcome desired is the same (Damore was not opposed to diversity, the memo was about better ways to achieve it). It's exposing the deep schism between progressives- who will lie, deny science, and trash others on the left- and liberals for whom logic, science, and reason still matter.
..and why is one person posting a paper on a politically charged subject now considered a 'creating a hostile work environment'?
..and why is one person posting a paper on a politically charged subject now considered a 'creating a hostile work environment' in the first place?
Or, "Don't fight the SJWs, you ignorant swine. They are your betters."
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
That's true. I guess I was trying to explain why the concept of "the first person to say something gets the advantage" is normally true... because "the first person to say something" is normally stating the status quo. I was trying to replace a bad rule with a more accurate rule and explain the overlap/confusion between the two.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
> 5. While a lot of what he said was protected, the statements on biological differences between the sexes (...) do not enjoy any legal protection and Google was - as a matter of law - okay to fire him on over them.
FTFY. Of course, firing him was a speech act by Google, and as we already know, speech that is legal still can have social consequences.
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences."
That's an interesting way to put it. The way the Clash said it was, "You have the right to free speech as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it".
Damore was dumb enough to actually try it. He thought that when people said they wanted open dialog and healthy debate, that those people wanted open dialog and healthy debate. Total aspie thinking.
Shut up, keep your head down, and let management tell you what you are supposed to think: solutions for modern living.
So If Google wants to shoot you for speaking, that's okay? Or is there some limit short of "however they please" on how they may react? If so, where exactly is that limit?
That is the question at hand here.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That says that Congress (and then via the later incorporation clause, state legislatures) cannot infring on free speech. It says nothing one way or another about whether or not anyone else may infringe on it. Free speech is broader than just the first amendment, which accepta it as a preexisting right and prohibits congress from infringing it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Where did he say anyone currently working at Google shouldn't have been hired. Be specific, give me a quote with context.
If you can't find one, please do be big enough to indicate that case.
I would also point out:
6. Sundar Pichai was on vacation when Damore decided to throw his little controversy party. And Pichai had to end said vacation prematurely and return to Google to deal with the fallout. California being an at-will state, "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a 100% legit reason to fire someone.
Imagine all the people...
sheeple
Zieroh's First Rule of Internet Arguments: the first person to say "sheeple" automatically loses the argument. Also, a riotous mob of monkeys will descend upon them and eat their genitals.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I agree, you got it right man...
As you say, "If you feel like a workplace is hostile because you can't say nasty things about your female coworkers, then it is you making the workplace hostile."
--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You might think I'm over-hyping that, but we're out here talking about it almost a year later!
The fact that we are still talking about it almost a year later should be a indication of how poorly it was handled by Google. If Google would have just internally disciplined him and not fired him, we probably would never heard about it at all.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
girls have lead since 2000, way before the change came in
Um, that is exactly when the change came in. From the article:
Boys have consistently outperformed girls for top grades when the test measured accrued competency, despite herculean efforts to improve girls performance to the disadvantage of boys.
And the new test is 100% exam based
O.o
No, that's not okay, because that's not speech and it's not legal. Firing you though *is* legal, and a perfectly valid action to take in return for your speech.
Firing you though *is* legal
That's the question that was at hand in this labor board review: was it legal, in this specific circumstance? Because it's not always legal to fire someone for their speech. So it's not a ridiculous position to take that this should be one of those circumstances where it's not. The labor board disagrees with that position, evidently, but we're all here talking about whether or not their decision was correct, so it's not prima facie true that it was.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
holy shit... you're a highlander? what's it like to live for hundreds of years?
for some of us... it is more than a law, but a guiding principle. and i don't know that you can enforce the guiding principle without breaking it at the same time.
i want to live in a world where people can say whatever the fuck they actually think, without risking their livelihood. without exception. but having the government enforce it would be granting the government more power than i'm comfortable granting it.
it really just means, that i'm waiting for everybody to grow up a little, and let people make the mistakes that are necessary for growth.
yes, the first amendment is about government intervention. but that's literally as much as it could cover without trodding on our rights. be careful of growing that lion you're riding too big.
They should really rename this site to "Mandot". There's not a woman to be found here. Wonder why?
I remember the old days, when Taco started this in Uni. Women were rare enough then, but the journal feature was introduced and we used to have a dynamic, if still heavily gender-weighted community.
Over time, Slashdot pivoted technically towards site changes that were contrary to development of this community, and mod policies that generated resentment, without improving the quality of conversation.
Now, we are left with something with little else to offer than a particularly resentful little MAGA subreddit. "Open sores" indeed.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Nope.Damore is not a protected class, women are
Nope. JUST his attacks on women, blacks and workers over 40.
He isn't a protected class like women, blacks and over 40's.
The political agenda of the right is intimidation, threats and thuggery.
Damore is guilty of all three and lawfully fired
So you agree the attack against Mr Damore's speech was state-mandated. Awesome.
That you feel his persecution was righteous, and you imagine it to have been inspired by blasphemies he never actually wrote, is unsurprising in lynch mob mentality.
A general understanding that you should be hygienic and bathe doesn't make a workplace hostile.
No, it constitutes odorism. Or maybe smellism. That's similar to racism, sexism, ageism, lookism etc. At least, that's what I have been taught by the progressive public.
His speech is illegal DUH!
Fake-progressive trolls sure do hate freedom of political speech.
Real neo-nazis hate Freedom of Antifa Speech!
Like it or not, "Freedom of speech" does not extend to sexual harrassment, including creating a hostile workplace.
WELL settled law going back 30 years.
Yup, fake progressive trolls suuuuuure do hate freedom of political speech.
Broham, look! Under your bed - there's a Nazi hiding! Ohhhh nooooez!