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Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

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Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#951

Post by wilg »

einhverfr wrote: post #901
wilg wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a betrayal of anything or anyone to vote for the better of two viable options (according to your own opinion)?

> How is it a betrayal of anything or anyone to vote for the better of two viable options (according to your own opinion)? How do you weigh two options when one has a record of imposing very long-term harms (PRWORA has now been on the books for almost 30 years and if you remember her response to Sanders' accusation she helped round up the votes for PRWORA, it was to defend the law) vs a more acute set of insecurities…

On the issue you originally mentioned – immigration – surely it's clear which where each of these two people stood. Look at their policy proposals, their party's policy proposals, their party's policy history, and their rhetoric. Then you vote for the one that's better. No matter how slight the difference (though in this case the difference is huge).

I'm not sure what issue you're referring to getting on the table. (I suspect it actually already is on the table.) But how does not voting get that issue on the table? It's too late to change the candidates' positions on election day. Are you hoping that years later a different set of candidates will try to address your concern by examining who didn't vote in the previous election? That seems unlikely. Candidates do what voters want, not non-voters. Opinion polls often throw out non-voters, too.

And most people care about multiple issues, so even if your main issue isn't addressed by anyone, you've lost the opportunity to try to make some progress on all of those "less important" issues.

The winning strategy for improving the world is not hard. Vote for the "lesser of two evils". Every single time. This will cause evil to decline. Maybe slowly, hopefully quickly.

Don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. The main two U.S. parties have a lot of differences. It should be pretty easy to figure out which closer aligns with your views.

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#952

Post by arrrg »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #333
arrrg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tolerance of someone who wants to deny your whole existence is not something anyone should ever tolerate. That‘s not a virtue, that‘s madness and potentially suicidal.

Be careful that you do not want to deny their whole existence in return. The example given was a gay person who encounters someone (a Muslim, say) who thinks they should be sentenced to death. But if the gay person decides in response that Islam should be eradicated, that's (at a minimum) cultural genocide. Note well: I am not an apologist for Islam. I consider their theology to be wrong. But in opposing them, don't…

Yeah, something has to give and we as a society have to find out what.

I don’t get why people shy away from making these hard calls. I mean, I don’t even think this one is a hard one to make.

Of course all of this does not exist in an ideology free completely politically neutral space. You have to make some assumptions and some value judgements. That’s ok. There is nothing wrong with that.

I’m also so weirded out when people try to construct working societies from this maximalist non-interference maximalist neutrality point of view. I don’t think societies have to be neutral.

You are also constructing one very weird case that just doesn’t work at all and makes no sense.

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#953

Post by bendbro »

bendbro wrote: post #814
memmcgee wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oftentimes the people they say are "executives" are just rank and file employees. I have a friend who is not an executive who got tricked into meeting with a Project Veritas scumbag. Thankfully they realized something was up and left the meeting.

That's a good point. In general I'd say outing a rank-and-file employee is bad form. There are exceptions of course, like if the employee's revealed behavior is at par with Edward Snowden. The only example I have is the Gennai one, which is what I'm referring to above. I'd love more examples of Project Veritas behaving badly

Note: not implying Gen Gennai's behavior was Snowden tier

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#954

Post by repolfx »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #948
cm2187 wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone else took notice that expressing conservative opinions in writing was a fireable offense.

Do you really think that there are no liberal opinions that are fireable? Like if I said all men are rapists, you think that’s a safe thing to say at work? I think people took notice that saying “women earn less money because their genes make them less good at stuff” is a fireable offense. I actually don’t believe conservatism has anything to do with it.

Damore didn't say that, but that didn't stop lots of people lying about what he wrote.

I guess those few of us who actually read his memo will have to keep repeating this over and over against the wall of lying about it, but one more time - Damore argued women were less interested in computing, and that's why they are "underrepresented". He explained why they might be less interested and showed that this isn't controversial at all, neither with scientists nor anyone who ever tried to interest a pretty girl in the merits of AVX512.

He explicitly didn't argue women were worse at computing though. He said that very clearly.

You ask what liberal opinions get you fired at Google. I'd also like to know that. Here is a petition by nearly 1500 of them which claims border control is comparable to the Holocaust. That's unbelievably extreme, but apparently nobody was fired for it.

https://medium.com/@no.gcp.for.cbp/google-must-stand-against...

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#955

Post by einhverfr »

wilg wrote: post #951
einhverfr wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it a betrayal of anything or anyone to vote for the better of two viable options (according to your own opinion)? How do you weigh two options when one has a record of imposing very long-term harms (PRWORA has now been on the books for almost 30 years and if you remember her response to Sanders' accusation she helped round up the votes for PRWORA, it was to defend the law) vs a more acute set of insecurities…

On the issue you originally mentioned – immigration – surely it's clear which where each of these two people stood. Look at their policy proposals, their party's policy proposals, their party's policy history, and their rhetoric. Then you vote for the one that's better. No matter how slight the difference (though in this case the difference is huge). I'm not sure what issue you're referring to getting on the table. (…

But what of those other issues? Health care reform that specifically singles out my family for additional burdens if I lose my job because I am married to an immigrant (back to the same issue)?

What I am doing is trying to help a third party organize so that if not this year, if not next year, if not in four years, we can eventually make an impact.

Basic point is: If my family is not to be fully included with the same rights, then you don't need my vote. This willingness to throw elections made the Democrats come around on gay rights. It ought to be used by those of us in mixed-nationality families to make them come around on immigrant rights.

(In addition to organizational efforts, I am in the running for volunteering for various positions in the American Solidarity Party, primarily because they do include families like mine in their agenda.)

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#956

Post by einhverfr »

80386 wrote: post #924
einhverfr wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense allowed?

I used to hang out in predominantly Californian tech circles, and the atmosphere there was... not at all respectful of places that aren't California. It would have been a good career move for me to suck up to them. Some of them were serial founders who hired their friends, and others could've given useful referrals. But that'd come at the cost of being constantly insulted, hearing my family constantly insulted, and s…

When I was in the US I used to have a big client in LA. When I would visit I would hang out with various immigrants when not working. There was a lovely Iranian family that owned a restaurant in the area of my client's office and we became friends.

I developed a very strong appreciation for how stratified California social class was on issues like public transportation.

Come to think of it I have been wondering why Sweden can have a really nice public transit system covering the entire country and California with less land, more people, and more tax dollars cannot. I bet that stratification is the answer.

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#957

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

einhverfr wrote: post #942
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there's Trump, who would be in one of the newer right-wing populist parties, and the religious fundamentalists who wouldn't fit into any party in most European countries.

In policy matters, Trump would still be in Liberal. He isn't threatening to ban importing tropical fruit for example, and he is far more hostile to the idea of a safety net than is the Danish People's Party.

There's no way he'd be in a classical liberal party. He has, at times, said he supports universal government-provided healthcare, and he favors heavy protectionism, both of which put him at odds with liberal economics. His erratic, right-wing populist message would also not fit with a liberal party.

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#958

Post by bendbro »

meroes wrote: post #854
bendbro wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some of their videos. They seem fairly damning, and rebuttals have always been fairly weak. For example, a google exec was captured on video saying: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”. In what context does that statement not amount to silencing conservative perspective on their platform? I completely agree it is their right to do so, and probably benefits the nati…

Trump situation. Not Trump. I am not sure what the context of the discussion was, but I am sure a Project Veritas video doesn't give the whole context. It could be referencing something unrelated to the election. Maybe it was about Net Neutrality or some other anti big tech signaling. Large companies have more sway than smaller ones. The fact that you go from one no-context quote to "silencing conservative perspectiv…

To a conservative, is "preventing the next Trump situation" any different than "preventing Trump"? I'm not arguing that Google shouldn't do this, I'm pointing out that the optics are garbage if we argue they aren't.

> I am sure a Project Veritas video doesn't give the whole context

Have you watched any? I would suggest you do before trying to convince others of their content. Again, what you are doing is garbage optics.

Another quote from Jen Gennai: "the same people who voted for the president do not agree with our view of fairness"

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#959

Post by letmeinhere »

squirrelicus wrote: post #765
magduf wrote: post #531

This is pretty strange to me. I've worked in a bunch of very different places, including Intel Corp. and also defense contractors and US government installations, and people generally stayed away from political discussions unless they were around people they already knew were like-minded. The only place I saw political discussion turn really sour was at Intel when we had a contractor who was extremely religious and c…

This is one of the cons of non-discrimination laws. We can't tell people like that why they got fired. Something tells me that if I could tell someone I fired them because of their support for antifa or the alt-right, that evil nonsense would bleed itself out of our society in a short time.

#bothsides, amiright? On one hand you have the continuation of a 150 year old white supremacist terror movement whose adherents have recently and repeatedly murdered dozens of people solely because of who they are, and on the other you have those scary people with the masks who will throw a milk shake at someone, just because that person is a fascist.

It's really too bad that we can't just empower indifferent moderates like yourself to sort things out in a totally even-handed and proportionate manner.

Re: Google Doesn’t Want Staff Debating Politics at Work Anymore

#960

Post by stcredzero »

geofft wrote: post #811
phonon wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's saying diversity is disruptive/adds friction . See https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128026...

I'm specifically saying that political diversity (sometimes inaccurately called "diversity of thought") is disruptive. If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so—how do you get the psychological safety to tell each other hard truths about their work? (As for demographic diversity, the SJW population and to a lesser the MAGA population ha…

If one side thinks the other side doesn't believe they should exist as people—and even more so if they correctly believe so

As someone who had grown up in a part of the country, where my parents had to drive almost 50 miles to hang out with people vaguely of the same ethic group, let me posit that the real problem is:

People who don't think certain other people should get to simply exist.

On the other hand, a company full of people who genuinely believe in fundamental human rights, self determination, live and let live, and the equality of people (even of people they don't like or agree with) does just fine. My former company did just fine with that. Democrats interacted with republicans, with people of faith, with atheists, with people of all backgrounds and skin colors.

The problem is with people who go around "seeking" people with the wrong opinion. Frankly, this reminds me of the same kind of "seeking" that some people who turned out to be racist enacted with me as a young adult, questioning me to find out how "American" I was to justify mistreating me. (Even some of them know better than to attribute to genetics what should be attributed to culture.) The similarity with which some people (who claim to be about "love" and "justice") enact the same "seek, then persecute" pattern is eerie to me.

I'd rather have someone who would use a racial slur on me, then accord me some meritocratic respect later, than someone who assumes I should think, vote, and affiliate a certain way based on my skin color, then gets outraged if my compliance to their expectations isn't 100%. True liberals are live and let live. It's false to be "liberal" and then demand ideological compliance -- or else. Doubly so if that reaction is based on identity.

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