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On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

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Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#381
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

calling someone a Nazi is a strong accusation, but the guy did repeat some extreme-right talking points. one of the footnotes basically repeats the argument that "cultural Marxism" has taken over the left. This is a common right-wing talking point often connected to an antisemitic conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School. I doubt the guy is an actual Nazi, but just like you I'm not specialized enough to evalu…

Huh? I assume you're talking about footnote #7: [7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core o…

I would strongly disagree with the part about "Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics". Marxism is still Marxism, and it's still about economics. Most Western Marxists are also socially liberal, but the so-called "cultural Marxism" is a chimera created by the right.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#382

One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong. I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism,…

It relates to Trumpism because this is why Trump won:

People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc.

As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on.

But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#383
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is increasingly my concern-- There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men. You can drag a white guy for pretty much any societal ill you like on the internet these days, and while there are some pretty great points to be made with respect to blaming a lot of modern society's problems on its principal architects (old white dudes), this is no wa…

> There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men. White men benefit immensely from our position of privilege. The notion that "racism" and "sexism" against white men exists in our society (the US) is just completely out of alignment with the facts as they are. Your statement is roughly analogous to someone opining that restraining a prison guard from…

You're using the relatively recent redefinition of the term "racism", that claims that racism is only systemic prejudice from a position of power (the so-called prejudice+power definition).

With this definition, yes, it is impossible to be racist to white males in US.

The problem is that this definition is not what the word actually means in colloquial English. So when most people talk about racism, they have that conventional definition in mind, not the stuff that social studies use these days.

And frankly, this attempt to rewrite the dictionary doesn't seem to have any reasonable justifications. We already had various terms and combinations of terms that describe the nuances fairly well - we had "racism" to mean "racial prejudice", and we had "systemic racism" to mean prejudice+power.

The only reason why I can see to change these around, to, effectively, replace "racism" with "racial prejudice", and "systemic racism" with just "racism", is because "racism" became a word with extremely heavy negative connotations. And some the same people who campaigned for it to become that - and rightly so, IMO - became uncomfortable with the fact that those negative connotations now also applied to some members of minority groups (e.g. the New Black Panthers). With the new definitions, this problem disappears - NBP is "prejudiced", but they're not "racist" anymore.

And this is very problematic, because the result of that is that bona fide hate speech - like, literal explicit calls for murdering people based on their race - is treated as more acceptable than e.g. pay disparity.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#384

Women don't go into tech because they don't like it. Boys like legos, girls like dolls. Sure there are occasional tomboys but the fact is most girls just don't like engineering.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952141 and marked it off-topic.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#385
post #322

I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions. I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting…

It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc. To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.

It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera. If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex…

In fairness, I'm aware of the hypocrisy in using positive discrimination to combat negative discrimination. I just haven't heard any better ideas to fix the problem. And the argument that we owe a debt to continue our forefathers' unfinished work towards a more perfect union is persuasive to me.

There is no positive and negative racial discrimination. There is only racial discrimination and its always a bad thing.

If you are advocating for racial discrimination against European people then your no different then European people who advocated for racial discrimination against Africans.

There was many books and arguments that advocated for discrimination as a 'good thing' in the 18th and 19th century. They are as morally bankrupt as the arguments made today in favour of racial discrimination against Europeans.

A more perfect union is not achieve in any sense by adopting racial discriminatory policies. You are headed in the opposite direction. These policies will be short lived and overturned, but in the meantime cause enormous harm and injustice.

Its very important that well intentioned people understand that they are playing with fire that they will not be able to put out with this issue. Racial discrimination in the 21st century, especially in education and employment are for all intent and purpose a form of slavery. And the people who are being effected by these illegitimate racist policies are growing a fire inside and it is spreading and that fire is going to grow and grow.

Trump is just the first spark of this fire if you understand me. There is righteous indignation of these policies and severity of the opposition to these injustices are going to be much more explosive then the 1960s were in terms of racial and societal disintegration.

You can not fix the problem of a perceived under-representation of certain groups such as Africans by forcefully removing and ghettoizing hundreds of millions of Dispirit European ethnic and religious groups from employment and other opportunities. I simply do not think many on the left understand the gravity of the repercussions that are unfolding because of these policies.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#387
post #346

> But this groupthink terrifies me when it’s used to bully people for exercising their right to free speech. How will we know what people are truly thinking if we rush to silence them? I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get…

> I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get you arrested for saying in public.

It's an argument that certainly makes a lot of sense from a libertarian perspective. But those of us on the left have already dismissed similar arguments - we know that when private commercial entities are sufficiently powerful, the limitations that they impose on their employees, customers etc can be so strong that they cannot be unchallenged (see the entire history of workers' rights movement, basically). We consider this immoral, and advocate for various limitations on the ability of businesses to do whatever they want.

If free speech is a public good, then why shouldn't the same standard be applied to it? I'm not even talking about legal aspects here, but purely the ethical side of things - shouldn't we at least condemn a situation where an entire industry effectively suppresses some opinions using its economic levers (employment among them)?

And if it's not considered a public good, then that should be explicitly stated, because that used to be one of the pretty basic tenets of liberalism.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#388

No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them. I think if google…

Manifesto dude: Women/Blacks are too stupid to be engineers

Women/Blacks: Fuck this guy

You: Why are those women/blacks being so rude?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#389
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism. No he doesn't. He says Marxists participated in gender/race politics, and the ultimate goal of Marxists was destruction of capitalism. Which, btw, if you read any of real Marxists - who aren't exactly hiding, thanks (not ironically, they shouldn…

I mean at the end of the day the story about “Marxist intellectuals” making an enemy out of “straight, cis white males” after “class warfare” failed to overthrow society sounds almost exactly like the Frankfurt School/“cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory. (Its a specific conspiracy theory btw, not just the general and true observation that the left is more concerned with race and gender than it used to be.) Maybe it’…

> sounds almost exactly like the Frankfurt School/“cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory

Nope, it does not. The only common things are that both talk about Marxists (as do many other conversations, including ours) and about gender politics (as do many other conversations, including guess what). Not everybody who opposes Marxists is a Nazi who thinks Jews from Frankfurt School want to take over the world. And not everybody who thinks class-warfare (or identity-warfare) approach to society is wrong is a conspirologist Nazi.

> Its a specific conspiracy theory btw

Right. And that's why using it as a generic club to bash over the head everybody who ever mentions Marxists and their participation in gender politics in negative light is wrong.

> Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.

Only because your major eyebrow was on hair trigger to be raised. You need to adjust your eyebrow so it won't raise over every mention of mundane political arguments and not call a Nazi everybody who says something about Marxists. Having such eyebrow makes you look bad.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera. If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex…

> If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex Which they do. > then they would not continually push for the expansion and entrenchment of race and sex based affirmative action programs They would continually push for the recalibration of them, which may include expansion in some areas. > which deliberately exclude people from employment opportunities, scholarships,…

> Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes are not opposed goals, and the left hasn't abandoned the former for the latter.

They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity. You are simply trying to gift success to a preferential and privileged race or sex. That is the method the American liberal left has chosen. And it is racist and sexist methodology.

> The left, OTOH, recognized that the absence of the latter causes the absence of the former (outcomes at t0 define opportunities at t1; one of the most important parts of outcomes are the opportunities that they create) and so in the absence of equality of outcomes, corrective measures are necessary to create equality of opportunity, and those measures are in many cases going to involve moving toward equality of outcomes, both in direct nature and indirect effect.

Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.

In most cases including employment and other competitive activities there will always be losers. When two tennis players play a game there will be one winner and one loser. When there is a management spot open in a company there will only be one winner and multiple losers. When 1000 applicants apply for a single job opening there will be one winner that gets the job and 999 people who lose.

What the Liberal Left has embraced by promoting equality of outcomes is the removal of equality of opportunity in its entirety for anyone they have preemptively decided should be the looser. There can be no competition in the first place and there is no opportunity. Winners are simply anointed by a committee of divinely anointed deciders.

If 1000 people apply for a job and 999 of them are White and Asian men and one is Black woman and the anointed deciders decide that a Black woman should get the job, which is what race based quotas do, those 999 white and Asian men had no equality of opportunity period.

If this is the sort of game that the Liberal left thinks they are going to play with hundreds of millions of people's lives, and they think they cap pick and choose who's hopes and dreams come true, and they can exclude hundred of thousand on a whim to meet an arbitraty and ever changing percentage of racialy balanced winners, good luck. The small window of accaptence of these sort of ideas are closing with the Baby Boomers. The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good. And they have every right to reject them. These are massive iniquality that the left thinks they are entitled to try and engineer into a very fragile and tenuous democracy.

In conclusion promoting the equality of outcomes is erasing the possibility of equality of opportunity. And in the specific case of hiring decisions using race as a criteria for deciding who wins the job it's simply an act of blatent discrimination by the specific employer and the management who made the decisions.

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