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

Why do you oppose racial diversity instead of taking no opinion on it? One would think a neutral observer, seeing no difference in efficacy between different types of workplaces, would not oppose one of those types of workplace anyway. The conclusion I make is that the observer is not neutral, but biased.

When you say you're "against racial diversity" you are saying you prefer racial homogeneity. If that's not what you mean, you should rethink how you state your preference. Many people would take that statement to mean that you're an avowed racist.

As quick clarification, if you aren't aware the Nationalist Socialist (AKA, Nazi) Party of America genuinely is a party that is protected by the First Amendment[1]. Conversely attempting to suppress Nazism forcibly didn't work either. Remember, Hitler and other early members of the Nazi party were imprisoned. It didn't stop them.

And regardless this is straying from the core point. Of course, advocating the mass extermination of Jews, Roma, or any other group would be grounds for a company to fire employees that make those statements - I did not and do not attempt to state that every piece of speech protected by the 1st Amendment should be allowed in the workplace. Rather, the simple principle is that tolerating a view that some people consider intolerant is not, itself, an act of intolerance. Let me put this in a scenario that is more appropriate to a workplace:

* You have two co-workers, A and B.

* A thinks that affirmative action (structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates) is necessary to have a tolerant workplace, and by extension not having these policies is an intolerant situation.

* B thinks that discriminating on the basis of sex or race in the hiring process is intolerant.

* Both A and B go to HR claiming that the other is making intolerant statements.

I would argue that if HR takes action against _either_ employee that would be an act of intolerance. Allowing A to make that statement isn't an act of intolerance against B, nor is B's an act of intolerance against A. Sure, I get that A _believes_ B's viewpoint to be intolerant and vice versa. But the company's decision to allow both statements is not an act of intolerance because of that. This is what I'm getting at by saying "there is no paradox of tolerance" in allowing speech. True, individual speakers may think the other is intolerance. But there is no intolerance in allowing these conflicting views to co-exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

Let's go on with answering the actual questions I posed - what you mean by equality, and how you propose to end systems of oppression.

So far you've proposed laws - which are a system of oppression, and your laws have nothing to do with equality either.

Going by your logic of who has controlled political and economic power - why not break it down by hair color and propose policies that make sure there is equality by hair color. Also eye color, and width of neck equality, very important.

I'm not sure how you're going to harmonize eye color equality with hair color equality, maybe we need machine learning to make it 'equal'?

I hope this example shows the lunacy of taking one trait and saying we now want to balance it out with another.

Let's have policy for equality of beautiful and ugly people too. If a beautiful woman gets to marry into more money/power than an ugly woman, we have to have equality there too.

I can go on and on, I hope I've shown how moronic the equality stance is. Ending systems of oppression is equally idiotic and I can devote another post to it someday.

>I'm hesitant to share anecdotes so I'll keep them fuzzy, but a few things I've seen are along the lines of places removing a comedic joke item because it /might/ give a newcomer the impression that the place "normalizes fascism" (rationale was fear someone wouldn't understand it's a joke and thus let's err on the side of keeping the space sterile), and hiring/comp policies designed around explicitly not paying men more than woman for the same role (everyone's the same role when your company doesn't have roles...) regardless of experience, performance, market, etc. at the expense of acquiring or retaining outstanding talent. And look what happened at Google...

You know your situation better than I do, but based on your descriptions I'm with your company on these. You haven't painted a very sympathetic picture of whatever this joke item is, and as for comp, I mean, it seems pretty logical that men and women should be paid the same for the same role, no? That doesn't mean you can't hire/retain talent, you just implement a leveling system like every other company and promote high performers to higher levels.

As for Google, are we talking about the guy who was a dick and caused a massive PR problem and got fired for it? And if your claim is that companies are making bad business decisions and you're pointing at Google, doesn't their 750B market cap undermine the point?

Or how about a pro affirmative-action person in deeply conservative areas? Plenty of people would say that it's a bigoted view. Not to mention, affirmative action is explicitly treating people better or worse based on their race, sex, or other aspect of their identity which is the literal definition of prejudice. [1] Some may say that careful application of prejudice is acceptable to account for past injustices (and I do, for example), but that does not change the fact that it is an example of prejudice.

Again, the fact that the majority of people would call a given viewpoint bigoted is just as much a statement about the environment that calls the view bigoted as it is about the view itself. Plenty of mainstream liberal views would be considered bigoted in other developed democracies (e.g. a lot of European countries don't practice affirmative action). Conversely, plenty of mainstream conservative views would be considered bigoted by liberals (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that I don't need to give an example).

[1] "Prejudice is an affective feeling towards a person or group member based solely on their group membership. The word is often used to refer to preconceived, usually unfavorable, feelings towards people or a person because of their sex, gender, beliefs, values, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality, beauty, occupation, education, criminality, sport team affiliation or other personal characteristics. In this case, it refers to a positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their perceived group membership" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice