Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

( And before anyone thinks that 'oppress' is too strong a word, the inability to marry caused tax and inheritance implications for LGBTQ individuals in California, some of which were unrecoverable. To this point, consider that people who died during Prop 8 will never get justice; will never get equal representation. )

I am sorry you feel like your views are unwelcome/oppressed, but religious groups in the United States have a very long and extremely well-documented history of doing real, lasting, absolutely life-altering harm to LGBTQ individuals. This harm caused to LGBTQ Americans isn't the same as feeling like your views are unwelcome at your place of work, and I hope you can at least see the difference.

Brendan Eich may sincerely hold his religious beliefs, but he didn't stop at simply believing: he gave money to further an utterly poisonous cause that brought real, and in some case unrecoverable, harm to tens of thousands of Californians.

Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left.

These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man.

This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false.

The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said.

It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable:

https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s

It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.

you're permitting a standard political talking point to be an entire topic of discussion, and then screening out some individual replies because they invoke additional standard political talking points.

you're allowing some standard political talking points and disallowing others. if you're doing that, it would be convenient for your users if you were to specify which standard political talking points are valid topics of discussion, and which other standard political talking points will get your comments banned.

The problem is that the word "diversity" doesn't actually mean merely having the presence of different races. Nobody who argues for "racial diversity" ceases to argue the moment the first black or Asian person is hired.

Rather, the phrase "racial diversity" has become code for its own kind of racism against white people. It doesn't mean the dictionary definition of diversity, consisting of multiple types. It means specifically eliminating and pushing out white people on the grounds that there are lots of them around in western countries, so harming them in some concrete, objective way isn't really harmful.

Moreover, the tactics normally used to obtain this so-called diversity are usually anti-meritocratic: literally the promotion and rewarding of people who do not deserve it on the basis of their work or skills alone, but just on the basis of skin colour. This is poisonous and demeaning to those people who do work hard, but don't benefit from being born "diverse".

It's really quite sad that this is actually a topic for debate, and that the ever more extreme elements in California have tried to make "meritocracy" a dirty word. But ultimately it'll be to the benefit of companies in other parts of the world who don't care about this strange and poisonous offshoot of political dialogue. I doubt there are many companies in Russia or China that force all employees to spend time on unconscious bias training, or who reliability promote unqualified people because of their DNA.

And the third of Americans that support him... are just idiots.

My friends and colleagues are more mellow than yours I guess.