Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces • Hacker News Board

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#881

Post by mjreacher » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

TMWNN wrote: post #842

inglor_cz wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Napoleonesque figure appearing soon. On Twitter, probably. Only half joking. After a certain time, most people get tired and afraid of constant paranoid vigilantism and start searching for protection. Any protection. And whoever gained positions of power from the previous tumult, will seek immunity from further revolutionary tumult, which is easiest to achieve by suppressing the worst Robespierres and ossifying the…

>From an outside perspective, it is striking how much the woke wave is waning compared to 2020. Trump is gone from Twitter, so a constant irritant has been removed, and people are starting to having a bit of a hangover. The ongoing self-recrimination in the media over the mass insta-dismissing a year ago of all COVID19 lab leak discussion—despite zero new evidence[1]—being one prominent example of the above, of cours…

>My point is that, as far as I know, there is zero new evidence available today to support the reasonableness of said hypothesis versus a year ago. The only difference is that Trump is no longer in the White House.

The major difference I see now is that a number of major US media networks reported that the US intelligence community views lab leak as a feasible scenario now, one of their two main ones.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#882

Post by phlakaton » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

Melchizedek wrote: post #689

nashashmi wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how his words based on the article were anti Semitic. They were anti Israel. And I find that you and everyone here and at google are having a hard time distinguishing between the two. Further based on the other comment to this post he was quite an activist. Fighting for rights of the racially oppressed and in minority. He went against white people and Israel? He is not racist. He is just anti majority dom…

Jews and Israelis are obviously not the same thing (even though the connection between them is very strong) but the reason you are not allowed to criticise _Israel_ in the US is that _Jews_ have a great amount of power there (hugely disproportionate to their population size).

Nonsense! People are criticizing Israel right and left around here in the Bay Area. Spend an afternoon in Berkeley and it will dispel any illusions you might have on the matter.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#883

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

sm4rk0 wrote: post #764

olivermarks wrote: post #697

A major reason why today's politicians are so bland and uninspiring is because they have been groomed to never say anything controversial or contentious. Trawling through adults adolescence photos and shaming/blaming them for some youthful indiscretion is another aspect of this societal disaster. The anti war candidate Tulsi Gabbard in the recent US election is an example of someone relentlessly ridiculed and destroy…

And if there was a referendum: "Political correctness should be dismantled", I guess most people would vote "Hell yeah!". So much for democracy.

It's hardly a failing of democracy that vague platitudes don't get turned into policy.

Ending "political correctness" might be unpopular in principle, but I doubt any specific proposal for how to dismantle it would be popular.

How would you even do that? You can't force people to not be offended by something.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#884

Post by throwaway2162 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

chefkoch wrote: post #854

throwaway2162 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AFAIK, he wasn't “global head of diversity” for any organization when he wrote it, but only many years later. He was literally a founding senior director for "equity in computing" at Georgia Tech and was a national strategy advisor to the Obama administration for bringing "equity and justice" to STEM (when he wrote this blog post). Please update your post as you're spreading FUD. >AFAIK, he wasn't “global head of di…

>was a national strategy advisor to the Obama administration for bringing "equity and justice" to STEM (when he wrote this blog post). Obama was in Office 2007?

Whoops, I copied and pasted a few edits and didn't move that.

He was working on the STEM initiatives for Georgia Tech at the time of his writing.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#885

Post by ackfoobar » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

sanity31415 wrote: post #850

ackfoobar wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ Male: 2.68 SD: 0.65 Female: 2.94 SD:0.67 d: 0.39 Non-native English user here, it seems the word "neurotic" has some connotation that the trait "neuroticism" doesn't? And that's why it's received so poorly?

"Neurotic" does have a negative connotation in common usage, but it's also the term used by personality psychologists, it's the 'N' in the OCEAN personality model. It means "risk averse".

"Educate yourself" is often thrown by the left in heated conversations.

But when a academic term (that is closely related to a negative word) is used, some on the same side refuse to understand and get butthurt instead.

E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23122068

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#886

Post by rufus_foreman » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #585

rufus_foreman wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Israel is an apartheid state Definition of apartheid: "a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population" Arabs and Jews are both white but I am guess that in your analogy you are referring to segregation of those groups, correct me if I misinterpreted your specific version of propaganda. In apartheid South Africa, whites and blacks didn't live in the same are…

> Definition of apartheid: "a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population" I find this a very curious definition. Why should the skin color of the oppressed population matter? Googling it returns this dictionary entry[1]: > (in the Republic of South Africa) a rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite populatio…

>> I find this a very curious definition

The word apartheid is an Afrikaans word (Afrikaans is a Germanic language spoken in South Africa) that was used as an election slogan by a South African political party that implemented complete segregation and racial classification in South Africa in the 1950s.

If you are not making a specific comparison to the former racial policies of South Africa, there are better words to use.

Although I know over time, meanings change, so that words like anti-Semitic, racist, fascist, etc. all just become synonyms for "bad" or "things I don't like".

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#887

Post by woodruffw » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

Udik wrote: post #860

woodruffw wrote: post #772

I think there are a few noteworthy components to this: * Kamau's post conflates Jews with Israel, which is simultaneously a common, innocent mistake and a rhetorical strategy used by Zionists and the far right. Having read the actual post[1], I'm inclined to believe that Kamau falls for the aforementioned strategy. * One of the Twitter accounts linked in the article, "StopAntisemitism," is a Zionist organization. The…

> They've been outspoken in their attempts to conflate Israel (and Israel's Jews) with Judaism as a whole But let's not pretend that the connection between Israel and US Jews is simply a prejudice. Here's an article from the Times of Israel quoting a recent Pew research: "More than 80% of American Jews said caring about Israel was an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them." [1] If this is how…

The actual poll[1] paints a substantially different picture: less than half of American Jews polled said that Israel was "essential" to them; the 80% figure comes from a separate group that explicitly said "important, but not essential."

That could mean any number of things. For example: I have family members in Israel. Their health and happiness is important to me. Does that make caring about Israel's affairs important to me? It would probably depend on how the question was framed. But it would be incorrect to conflate that with support for the Israeli state.

Other important numbers from the poll:

* Only a minority of American Jews (34%) oppose the BDS movement, and believe (33%) that the Israeli government's peace effort is "sincere"

* Only 32% believe the core doctrine of Zionism, i.e. that Israel was is the land of the Jews by birthright.

In other words: I don't think it's correct to conflate the American Jewish identity with any positive or dispositive interest in Israel. We're a big group, and our national identity is overwhelmingly American. Asking us to reconcile our ethnoreligious identity with an unrelated national identity is bewildering at best, and insulting (cf. canards about Jewish loyalty) at worst.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-ha...

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#888

Post by grammarprofess » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

thelopa wrote: post #723

throwkeep wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that, only the purest of the pure can be employed. Look at Apple's recent mob firing of Antonio García Martínez. Who made the mistake of writing a best selling and critically acclaimed book just 5 years ago. Featured as one of NPR's best books of the year, recommended by NYT, Washington Post, etc. But now it's suddenly a fireable offense. “An irresistible and indispensable 360-degree guide to the new…

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.” “PMMess,…

I love these paragraphs so accurate. Truth hurts I guess, womyn at FB were DONE with the guy who published a description of their lives to the world.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#889

Post by peoplefromibiza » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #827

andrei_says_ wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” And hey, great news, now we have every line written by every man, woman and child automatically captured and archived forever in an easy to search dossier. Someone who wrote a racist or anti-Semitic comment in 2007 could have evolved to deeper understanding and to a more compassionate worldview…

> Someone who wrote a racist or anti-Semitic comment in 2007 could have evolved to deeper understanding and to a more compassionate worldview. But the writing remains forever, conveniently accessible. Not all writing is equal. There is a difference between let's say a tweet that was sent in during a flamewar versus a personal blog post that has been penned in the past and stayed published until today. The function of…

Coincidentally I was talking about that time that Tom Petty toured in the 80s using the confederate flag and then many years later he apologized for doing it, no more than an hour ago with a friend of mine

More details here

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...

People do change and also understand when they do «downright stupid things», but we have to give them a chance to arrive at that point.

If the post is still online, like the videos and photos of Tom Petty's 1985 tour, that could also be interpreted as a sign of honesty, it's also possible that the author forgot that he wrote it.

I write a lot of things that I don't remember soon after.

It happens to code as well, sometimes I ask myself «who's the genius that wrote this beautiful code» and I'm shocked when I find out it was me years ago, but most of the times I regret writing it.

Re: Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces

#890

Post by 13415 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #161

13415 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for linking that. It puts the issue in perspective. To be honest, I'm amazed that a blog post like that can make someone lose his job as a "head of diversity." Apparently, diversity at Google means that people should never voice critical opinions about the Israeli government, not even privately. For me, the lesson to learn from this is that to never apply for a job in the US or for a job for a large US company…

this isn’t just criticizing israel. this is criticizing all jewish people as being war hawking hypocrites unable to remember history who don’t care about anyone but themselves. it’s clearly antisemitic. and if he wanted to make this about israel it should have been phrased “if i were an israeli” which still isn’t accurate cause not everyone in israel suppported this maybe the lesson is if you are going to make sweepi…

While I wouldn't put it the same way he did, calling this "clearly antisemitic" goes way over board and is in my point of view unacceptable. Besides, albeit regrettable, it is common for Israelis to mix up their religion with political matters, too.

The kind of ferocity with which people reject other people's opinions and evaluate them to the highest possible moral standards once they disagree with them is a special kind of modern savagery. We're talking about a blog post this guy wrote ten years ago as a private person. Maybe he even changed his opinion or regrets the way he phrased it then?