I’m all for people facing consequences for boneheadedness. One has to choose his battles and especially so when you know the line of equally qualified applicants for the job stretches out the door halfway to San Mateo, that’s just reality. Dude was pushing the envelope as to how can I couch my words so they just step right up to the line of company tolerance, and was called on it. Google decided they can better withstand a shitstorm from the Right and Outside than one from the Left and (more importantly) Inside, that’s a business call.
I’m not too sanguine however about the “he should not be able to get a job at any other major company” thing. What, are we going to have to chase him around to make sure we web-shame anyone who hires him or gives him a contract? He got what he had coming, let him learn from it. If he doesn’t he’ll fail again.
I’ve only read the last page here, I have not read the man’s memo in full and I am not prepared to give my two cents. However, I’ve read articles that he’s planning to sue Google now, or believes they acted illegally in firing him.
That’s completely stupid, right? I was under the impression you can fire an employee for any reason at any time and you don’t even have to give the reason. My understanding is he could only be fired illegally if he’s a member of a protected class. Is that correct?
I was under the same impression but apparently he’s going for the angle that he was fired as retaliation for a complaint about an unfair personnel policy so it comes under Fair Labor Standards.
Based on the snippets that have been drawn out here, I find it highly unlikely that he’s not some kind of misogynist. I don’t think he should have lost his job for being a misogynist (unless it directly impacts how he’s treating people he works with) but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to fire someone for writing a ten-page screed about liberal bias in a workplace environment. It’s easy to interpret what he’s writing as, ‘‘Here are some very logical reasons women may be incompetent at tech jobs…For example, they’re really neurotic and like totally can’t handle the stress.’’ Yeah, no. Whatever his intent, his statement demonstrates a pretty profound lack of good judgment and I can’t fault Google for doing whatever the feel they had to do. I would be zero percent surprised if the women he has worked with can’t fucking stand him and are glad he’s gone.
I have always been, and continue to be, extremely against internet mob justice. The former staff member who wrote that response screed about how employees would want to punch him in the face was being pretty shitty. It sounds like Google wanted to use this as a gigantic virtue-signaling moment and in their attempt to put a positive spin on how gosh-darned enlightened they are, they fucked the guy over beyond a simple firing. I am really distressed by that.
That Scott Alexander stuff Budget Player posted sounds like some high-grade paranoia. If I understand it correctly, he’s saying that much like Jews or Muslims fear unfair discrimination, he finds it difficult to take feminist issues seriously because he’s afraid of being discriminated against for his maleness. :dubious: So he’s inclined to throw women under the bus to avoid that icky conceptual weapon. Yeah, fuck him. Fuck anyone who has ‘‘serious reservations’’ about women’s demand to be treated equally.
It all depends on what kind of contract Damore had with Google. Most likely it was an “at will” contract, but I don’t know that for sure. This kind of contract gives both the employer and employee at lot of leeway about quiting and firing, but these rights are not absolute. The employer does not need to give cause for firing, but an employee can challenge that decision if he can show some sort of impropriety, such as (as you pointed out) if the firing violated a protected class, or violated the employees protected rights. or if the firing can be shown to be unfair, such as by being singled out and punished for behavior that others are not fired for. Since this is a very public firing, the “at will” status is no longer in play, since there is a cause as a matter of public record. Now it’s up to Damore to fight that cause and Google to defend it.
I’m sure some lawyer will find some standing to justify the lawsuit.
As a fiction writer, I find this sort of shit utterly fucking terrifying. When I saw the subject, I was about to say this is why I write about racism in a fantasy context so people won’t be able to connect it with real…
Nope. Apparently not even that will save us.
This is not a joke to me. My current speculative fiction WIP deals heavily with the theme of sexual assault (and many other aspects of sexuality), poverty, racism, and all that shit that keeps me up at night. I have worked on those issues in the manuscript exhaustively, and done everything conceivable to deal with them realistically. I have an axe to grind myself against the way sexual assault is commonly used in the media as a plot device or with intent to titillate, but I just know someone somewhere is going to decide I’ve got it all wrong, and hate me for exploiting victims. But the idea that some self-important child on Twitter could possess the power to smear my professional reputation based on her ignorant opinion is just about unbearable.
That’s what I was thinking, He is not a public figure, and therefore libel laws are more strict and offer the most protection to the citizen. Under those standards, he may have a case in my non-lawyerly opinion. Headlines decribing his memo as an ‘anti-diversity screed’ could be seen as libelous, in my opinion. I think it would be possible to show that they slanted the tone and content of the titles for the purpose of smearing his reputation.
Sorry Sam, my comment was in reference to YA Twitter, where some dumb teenager accused an author of being a white supremacist because her book was about racism and had racist characters. What particularly crossed the line in my view was the totally unfounded claim that the author had white supremacist friends.
But on the subject of that guy, I found an interesting article about the Google decision to fire him. The short version is, it wasn’t a knee-jerk decision and not everyone agreed. I’m going to surprise no one and say I’m siding with the feminist view here. Also, it sounds like while he started the memo on the smaller anonymous grievances board, he escalated things by reposting it to a much larger, broader in scope miscellaneous board that then got the attention of corporate. https://www.recode.net/2017/8/10/16125452/google-sundar-pichai-fire-james-damore-diversity-memo
To reiterate, I think his dismissal was reasonable and I hate internet mob justice. I don’t see evidence that Google launched a smear campaign, only that a former employee took it upon himself to be Internet White Knight and the media ran with the story.
And I don’t find it terrifying at all. I agree the teenager’s assessment is wrong (given what I know about the book). I agree that any sort of threat in the real world or online is wrong. But all I see described in that article is a bunch of people expressing their opinion that you shouldn’t read a particular book.
Sure, it can be misapplied. But I don’t see that as a problem. Either their ideas will latch on and people will change, or they won’t. If they do, then mores change. If they don’t, then they get shown they are wrong.
I will say that the publisher saying you should ignore the arguments by the readers is worrying. If they are the gate keepers to the public, they should be listening to the public. As is, they’re making themselves less and less relevant.
When it crosses into real life (which can include stuff online), then there is a problem. I agree with that. But that’s something I find bad in every direction, left or right. It’s still not an SJW thing.
What is social justice related are kids caring and fighting for a better world, and not letting those publishers tell them what that better world is. They get that everything matters.
They just need more experience to know what racism actually is, and why someone being portrayed as racist can be about reform instead of justification. They’re kids. They’ll find this out soon enough.
The squirmy thing in the YA example is people with a shit-ton of power - social media “influencers” and bloggers with massive followings - starting crusades against people with zero power - an unpublished author - and then claiming to be ‘scared’ and ‘damaged’ when people start arguing the other side. That’s just simple bullying, and there’s no excuse for it.
This. And, BigT, I dedicate between 10 and 20 hours a week to my fiction, not counting the hours I spend in critiques and reading craft books. My art is my life. I’ve spent four years on my current project. I’m reading that I can bleed years into my work and some dumbass kid with a megaphone can throw numerous obstacles into the already harrowing path of publication, and that’s personally really upsetting to me. Perhaps the reason it’s not scary to you is because you have no idea how hard it is to be a serious writer.
My writer friends more or less talked me down on being terrified, though they agreed it was some crazy bullshit. I find mob justice scary in general, but this one just hit too close to home.
See? You don’t know jack shit about this guy other than this memo (aside: lack of good judgment? It’s a memo on what he sees as a problem at google, written anonymously in a forum specifically for that purpose!), and you already see fit to assume that the women who worked with him can’t fucking stand him. You’re rounding him to the nearest cliche:
Feminism is a memeplex that provides a bunch of pattern-matching opportunities where a man is in the wrong and a woman is in the right. To give a very personal example, I mentioned a few days ago how I was close friends with a woman until I asked her out and she then decided to have a fit and cut off all contact with me. Normally everyone would agree I was in the right and try to console me and maybe even her own friends would tell her she was overreacting. But thanks to feminism she has a superweapon - she can accuse me of being a Nice Guy ™ and therefore Worse Than Hitler ™. The appropriate cliche having been conveniently provided, enough people decide to round to the nearest cliche and decide that I am in the wrong that the incident raises her status and decreases my own.
At least we’re on the same page here.
No. No, you didn’t understand what he’s saying, and you’re taking his objection to feminism to say one thing and mean another. He’s complaining about the memetics of feminism, not the core tenet of women being treated equally. You seem unclear what he’s actually talking about, as the two of you are describing two very different things: “feminism” as in the belief that women should be treated equally, and “feminism” as in the feminist movement and all attached and adjacent actions, activities, and particularly memes. I mean that in the classic “memetics” sense, not as in “dank memes”; ideas that spread throughout the movement. “An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.” And like it or not, but this kind of pattern-matching and rounding to the nearest cliche absolutely is a part of the feminist memeplex. (Obviously not just feminists, but feminists tend to do it a lot.)
And it’s not just paranoia. Take, for example, a different Scott, Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson, a while back, wrote a soul-baring post about his problems with male privilege in his specific case, talking about how he spent his formative years terrified of hurting, offending, or creeping out women, to the point where he wanted to chemically castrate himself. He looked to the feminist literature, and this only made his problems worse:
Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.
Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.” At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself. The psychiatrist refused to prescribe them, but he also couldn’t suggest any alternative: my case genuinely stumped him. As well it might—for in some sense, there was nothing “wrong” with me. In a different social context—for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl—I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine. (And after a decade of being coy about it, I suppose I’ve finally revealed the meaning of this blog’s title.) […]
Now, the whole time I was struggling with this, I was also fighting a second battle: to maintain the liberal, enlightened, feminist ideals that I had held since childhood, against a powerful current pulling me away from them. I reminded myself, every day, that no, there’s no conspiracy to make the world a hell for shy male nerds. There are only individual women and men trying to play the cards they’re dealt, and the confluence of their interests sometimes leads to crappy outcomes. No woman “owes” male nerds anything; no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals; everyone’s free choice demands respect. That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience. But I hope you now understand why I might feel “only” 97% on board with the program of feminism.
This guy is a feminist. His own neuroses led to feminism causing him a lot of pain and suffering. He literally wanted to kill or castrate himself on a regular basis. He could have easily redpilled, but he didn’t, because the concepts of feminism mattered to him, and were important to him, and he considered them valuable, regardless of the pain he personally had to suffer as a result.
[Aaronson’s post] is the whole “how can men be oppressed when I don’t get to have sex with all the hot women that I want without having to work for it?” whine, one that, amongst other things, starts on the assumption that women do not suffer things like social anxiety or rejection…It was just a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men. [He is saying that] “having to explain my suffering to women when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs, is so tiresome…I was too busy JAQ-ing off, throwing tantrums, and making sure the chip on my shoulder was felt by everyone in the room to be bothered to do something like listen.” Women are failing him by not showing up naked in his bed, unbidden. Because bitches, yo.
The eternal struggle of the sexist: Objective reality suggests that women are people, but the heart wants to believe they are a robot army put here for sexual service and housework.
The entire article is really an impressive example of exactly what Scott Alexander is talking about: using the feminist memeplex to pattern-match to the nearest misogyny trope. To the degree that Amanda Marcotte actually read the blogpost she decided to “fisk”, she didn’t actually pay attention to what Aaronson had to say. She casually flew over it, saw “man complaining about being lonely”, and pattern-matched that to “Nice Guy™ complaining about why women aren’t lining up to give him blowjobs”. No, literally:
[INDENT](sigh)
Translation: Having to explain my suffering to women when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs, is so tiresome.[/INDENT]
She keeps “translating” him, in the same way one might translate Shinzo Abe if one wanted to paint him as the worst possible human being, and also didn’t actually speak any japanese. It’s not about actually reading what he has to say, or understanding his perspective. It’s about being able to say, “Ooh, he complained about being alone, that’s just like all those Nice Guys™ who wonder why being nice to women doesn’t make them automatically deserving of sex”. And then you round to the nearest cliche, and away we go. Again: not a feminism-specific thing (atheists do this a lot too), but there is a lot of it in feminism.
You really can’t pretend this isn’t a thing. It may not be inherent to the concept of “feminism”, but it sure is a part of modern feminist culture. A toxic and mindkilling part of it, which makes it incredibly hard to talk about feminism, or even to ask, “Should we maybe tone it down a notch? Have we maybe gone too far?” Not everyone does it, but there are enough examples of it to be worried about it.
K, I’m going to have to take this in pieces. (I can’t sleep, so whatever.) - Also, who the fuck still has a Livejournal???
Your quotes from that LJ post out of context really give a much different picture from the full article. I actually (mostly) agree with the article, though I don’t like the idea of lumping all of ‘‘feminism’’ together as one set of problematic conceptual superweapons. There are a lot of different ways to be feminist. I am personally sick to goddamn death of whatever thing some feminists are doing these days… is there a word for the ‘‘new’’ social justice movement, or whatever is happening? Because it’s even different from what I got into 5 years ago. I’m a woman, and have had the feminist conceptual superweapon turned on me. So it’s not even a threat reserved for people of the privileged population.
That said, to a certain extent, pattern-matching is just what humans do. Women avoid people who act like rapists even if they might not be rapists. ZPG Zealot, bless her heart, has been excoriated on these boards for the ‘‘handshake rape’’ claim, but fundamentally, what she is saying, is that if someone doesn’t respect your boundaries for little things, it’s a potential sign that they won’t respect your boundaries for much bigger things. I think we all do this with other people to some extent, but women do have a keener sense for this pattern among men they meet because almost all of us have been in that situation where we ignored a warning sign and got in over our heads as a result. And of course, when that happens, it’s always our fault.
That said, I came to reading this thread, and that guy’s memo, with an open mind, and think not everything he said is objectionable, but there’s a high degree of overlap between people who get stuck on biological differences between men and women, and misogynists. It may very well be pattern-matching but as I’m not the one responsible for this guy’s employment and have no interest in publicly shaming him, and I don’t know him personally and have no control over his reputation, I really don’t see how I’m obligated to look any deeper than the pattern. All I have is the information I have. Based solely on this memo, the odds are better than not that he has problematic views toward women. For one thing, the guy is complaining about so-called discriminatory policies in a company that comprises 80% men.
Also, based on the article I posted upthread, I think your understanding of the context is inaccurate. The memo started as written in a forum specifically for that purpose, and largely went unnoticed, but he then distributed it on a much larger forum with a much broader scope, which is when it attracted corporate attention.
To be fair, my understanding of the context was also inaccurate. Apparently Google has a really, really liberal culture when it comes to these types of discussions. It seems this wouldn’t be as inappropriate as if it happened at Pratt and Whitney or something. But Google execs deemed it inappropriate, so I’m guessing they have a greater insight into their culture than I do.
I tell this story a lot, and probably have told it twice already in this thread, because it’s illustrative of whatever the fuck is wrong with some social justice folks these days. For a little setup: I have a Master’s Degree in Macro Social Work, I work as grant writer for a nonprofit serving victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, and I have a fucking billion radical left feminist queer anti-racist activists colleagues, some of whom I became quite close to during grad school. These people populated my Facebook feed, and at one point, I wholly identified with them. While I still identify with the core of their work, I would say a rather large chasm has opened between us and I don’t know how to close it. This story is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
An aggressively feminist male friend of mine posted a blog article by a woman who had been victimized by many men. The author said, in essence, ‘‘I don’t trust any men and that’s society’s problem, not mine.’’
I (another woman who has been victimized by many men) responded to my male friend, ‘‘That is some weak-minded, irrational bullshit.’’ No, I wasn’t polite. I was pissed off.
Enter stage left, some random-ass woman we’ll call Best Friend (also victimized by many men) to tell me I’m tone-policing, and shouldn’t call women irrational because historically that’s been how people silence women, and also I shouldn’t Not All Men this victim of trauma. And of course she had to add that this being a Victim of Trauma, her words were sacrosanct and I just couldn’t understand.
Says I, I’m a victim of trauma also, so how do we get to decide who’s right? I start breaking down the statistics.
Then Best Friend starts talking about how she totes hates men and has a right to hate them, but likes White Knight Boy, and what a great guy he is, because he rolls over when she tells him he’s Doing It Wrong. Then she tries to turn it into some kind of More Traumatized Than Thou pissing match because what else can she do? She’s been totally accustomed to her every observation being encouraged and embraced no matter how fucking stupid, and probably nobody in her entire life has asked her to think rationally about her position. She now has to save face.
It turned into a complete clusterfuck that somehow managed to involve both my mother and my Aunt getting blocked by White Knight Guy simply because they were trying to make sense of this nonsense. My Aunt said something to Best Friend like, ‘‘Wait, obviously you don’t hate all men because you’re best friends with White Knight Boy,’’ and White Knight Boy totally lost his shit on my Aunt, I guess threatening to hunt her down? I dunno, I had exited the conversation by that point. He basically screamed at her that she had NO RIGHT to tell anyone else how to cope with their trauma.
To which I responded, well you sure as hell seem to be telling me how to cope with mine, since coping with mine consists of not doing shitty things to other people just because shitty things were done to me, and speaking out against bigotry even when it’s not convenient.
White Knight Boy’s head explodes, because now he has a bunch of Lady Victims disagreeing and doesn’t know how to handle it. How he ended up handling it was posting on my personal feed several times a day to try to convince me that it is totally okay for women to hate men. I took an extended hiatus from Facebook, went back, found more of the same kind of bullshit everywhere I looked, and made that hiatus permanent.
So yeah. You’re preaching to the choir as far as that goes.
But I am a feminist, and that is not my feminism. If anybody wants any traction with me, after what I’ve been through and what I stand for, they are not going to talk about feminism like it’s a dirty word. Talking derisively about a whole movement that is so complex it comes in waves, for Christ’s sake, is a good way to alienate people who might otherwise agree with you. That kind of generalization is intellectually sloppy and damaging to the work for women’s rights. It is its own sort of conceptual superweapon memeplex in which the feminist is always overreacting.
That one’s kind of heavy, so I’ll tell you the funny one:
SJW Friend, who is 1/16th Native American and extremely white looking: Is it really necessary to Skyrim to have so much racism toward the Kajit? NPCs say such offensive things to the cat people! Why do I have to deal with this bullshit in my fantasy game?
Me: I’m currently writing a fantasy novel that deals with racism, which is an important issue I’d like to explore in a different context. I think artists often add in details that reflect reality as a broader commentary on modern society.
Some other Person: Agrees with me. Some other Person: Agrees with me.
SJW Friend: Interesting how all the people arguing with me are white.
She’s an attorney. Every day something new she was pissed off about. Don’t miss her either.
