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Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

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Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#271

Post by psyc »

mcv wrote: post #222
car_analogy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. - 1 Samuel 15 That's one example. The old testament claims God commanded the total extermination of multiple nations competing with the Israelites [1]. This ext…

This might be overly pedantic of me, but Samuel is not part of the Torah. It's part of the Nevi'im.

Here's some classic leadership from Moses. Numbers 31:17

"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves"

And from the Big Guy Himself, Deuteronomy 20:

"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves [...] However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"

Does that count as one isolated instance, or six?

(Just btw: I offer the above merely as a counterexample to a rather glaring claim, not as a criticism of Judaism. Just because I was taught as a small child, by christians, that everyone who disobeys god deserves to die, and if they don't it's solely due to his mercy, doesn't mean everybody contextualizes these passages that way. Also, the term "murder" is slippery because it isn't a synonym of "kill". If you argue an instance of slaughtering people is justified or legal, you can make it "not murder" by mere definition.)

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#272

Post by eternalban »

whoevercares wrote: post #190

I observed it multiple times during CS graduate school. An Indian high caste classmate refused to let his roommate sleep in the same bedroom. The higher caste guy told us that his roommate is of lower caste. The other poor guy ended up very obedient and sleep in the couch for 2 years. They have a group of high caste guys and talk sht about a few fellow low caste guys in the class Eye opening.

! This was in US? What school was this?

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#273

Post by tristor »

jmyeet wrote: post #154

There's a lot of bias in the tech industry, not just caste. if your company is sufficiently large it will have various HR policies on this and in my experience they will enumerate the kinds of discrimination they don't tolerate. Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't th…

> For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.

Ageism is illegal in the US, however the way the law is written it specifically only protects people over 40. I've always personally theorized that this is why tech ageism tends to start affecting people in their 30s, so that it doesn't wait until it's illegal and gets the job done of oppressing more senior employees earlier on.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#274

Post by jonnycomputer »

yalogin wrote: post #118

The talk should have allowed to go through. The post I think said it right, people wanted to shut it down and the only way to do it is to discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments. However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of…

I think you may be underestimating the number of people affected in the US.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#275

Post by vijaybritto »

avensec wrote: post #163
sitkack wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just caste discrimination, but also sexism. I have worked at least three companies where if there were Indian women, the vast majority were in QA.

I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background. My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism.…

Good team mates. This is non existent in India. A woman in a management position has much harder steps to reach there and will be impossible if she is from a lower caste.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#276

Post by delecti »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #268
sitkack wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just caste discrimination, but also sexism. I have worked at least three companies where if there were Indian women, the vast majority were in QA.

Is QA lower tier work in most places? Isn't that bass-ackwards?

It is definitely viewed as lower tier, which is unfortunate because it's incredibly valuable.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#277

Post by jcranmer »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #40
cafard wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the explicit race discrimination in the GI bill/redlining.

> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1

I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics:

* Reconstruction

* Settling of the American West

* Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements

* Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that

* Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements

* Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War).

It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#278

Post by inglor_cz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #12

Quoted post unavailable.

> importing ethnicities means importing their ethnic conflicts too, always Is there evidence for this? Couldn't null be valid: those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind? Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values. Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity, and any will to act on it, behind. There may remain implic…

"those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind"

In the modern, technologically connected world, it is much harder to leave nonsense behind. Even if you move to the other side of the world, you will still be exposed to your home country's politics through easily obtainable TV channels and through your Internet acquaintances on worldwide social networks. In a way that was impossible in 1920 or 1820.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#280

Post by naravara »

causi wrote: post #106
naravara wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have? The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciousl…

a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Go…

> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral?

This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs."

I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.

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