> If a person is engaging in reasonable dissent then why is this true: "If anything, their position will be radicalized."?
Uhmmmm.... because they get fired for deviating from the party line, not for being unreasonable. How can you skip that "detail"?
In this case, it seems to be even lamer than that, seems like he was not fired for the memo, but the reaction to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977750
> Damore said he initially shared the memo a month ago, but "no one high up ever came to me and said, 'No, don't do this,' even though there were many people who looked at it," Damore told Bloomberg. "It was only after it got viral that upper management started shaming me and eventually firing me."
So, what's hiding under this leaving out crucial parts and misrepresenting in the context of destroying people while paying lip service to being for people being unafraid? Anyone else seeing this?
> The (true) implication is that their reasonable dissent actually is a bland cover for a position that is much more radical once it is reduced to its core propositions.
This is so incredibly sinister and you don't even know it. Here's an example: a kid has a legitimate grievance, or at least legitimately thinks it does, but when it brings it up modestly, non-radically, it gets hit in the face. Now it will do something "bad", like cuss or somehow act out, because it is not allowed to place the grievance where it should be -- and then that is used to excuse that initial oppression or however you want to call it. Another example is SS officers despising people in concentration camps for being the diseased husks they turned them into, seeing this as a confirmation for their inferiority. Roll your eyes how much you want at that, chose whatever example you want, but that is the mechanism, that is an apt analogy just as much as bad parenting. Heck, get hung up on me somehow equating the Holocaust with a kid getting hit, I really don't care because people who don't want to understand always find something.
Granted, even being fired is no excuse to be radicalized. He's not a little kid, and he's not being made physically sick. But he also has a mob against him, plus the support of many he actually might not want want to be a martyr for (I mean, does anyone even allow for the fact that he is not some kind of closeted alt-right monster?), and that's more pressure than someone who was not on the receiving end of stuff like this can imagine, so I'll call that a wash. The point isn't (to me) "would he be justified to go loopy now", but "was this an okay reaction by the stronger party, and should this be normalized". My answer is no, and no. But not because it might lead to things I don't want, because it itself is already something I don't want either. Kinda of like I don't think corporations shouldn't turn street kids into sausage "because it would lead to a backlash and therefore make bad financial sense", but because it'd be evil. And I might not even want to sit with people who want the right thing for the wrong reason, because this is some very fundamental and serious stuff IMO.
If the memo caused a shit storm or went viral amongst assholes or both, but the memo itself was not grounds for termination or even internal criticism, then the spineful thing to do for Google would have been to have the discussion, not fire the guy, drop him like a hot potato, and then patting themselves on the shoulder for it. That's disgusting. They have just proven in action what a human life is worth to them, the rest is lip service, plus a whole lot of distortions which are the main hard data points so far.