Closet conservatives (and other moral minorities) across the Valley are now virtually guaranteed to shut their closet doors even tighter.
Post election, I recall my timelines erupt with emotion -- outrage, despair, betrayal -- then subdue to reflection. Some called for the need to truly reach out to those across the aisle and to listen and understand, earnestly lending an ear even to views that we strongly oppose.
Recent events will be a step back in such relations, as dissent has been dismissed demonstrably without such considerations.
When the people we must understand in order to reach bipartisanship go into hiding for fear of being outed, broadening our perspective becomes difficult.
The problem is that reasonable political opinions motivated by nothing resembling hatred are being targeted as indicative of hateful thought.
A perfect example is the stand one may take that 'Sanctuary Cities' are bad. Voicing opposition to sanctuary cities can get you labelled as a racist, which is ridiculous.
In a separate thread I wrote this excerpt, which is related to what you are getting at:
We've always conflated moral leanings with truth.
Previously, "the truth" was right leaning; it is now left leaning. Unfortunately, many people find (and have always found) that all it takes to dismiss an opposing moral position is to point out that their opponent's position is untruthful, and the discussion (or lack thereof) ends there.
Well said. The challenge is that good politics is not always nice.
As a general principle, much of modern Western thought seems to be obsessed with minimizing any sort of discomfort in the present moment, regardless of whether that discomfort is a temporary and necessary phase one must pass through in order to reach a better future.
Do you think this person will change his beliefs in light of what has happened? I would expect him to be defensive of his views and to even double down on his convictions.
If we truly believe that our own positions are correct and we truly want progress, we must understand how others could become misguided and persuade them away from their errant ways. We get there by reaching out, listening, and understanding.
You can say whatever you want. You can be as loathsome or virtuous as you'd like on your own time and dime. But the moment what you say goes contrary to the shared expectations of the company you belong to or negatively impacts how business is done, you're finished.
It's neither difficult nor arguable, but it's a bit of a cop-out. Google is, of course, well within their legal rights to fire the employee. The 1A applies only to government restrictions on speech.
But the larger question, of whether it is good that a particular political ideology, adhered to by a small minority of the country, should hold such sway over public discourse that to challenge any of its dogmas is to commit career suicide, remains. This is a trend that is only accelerating, and it's going nowhere good.
If he held his opinion purely in the public sphere, I'd agree with you - but he posted it in an internal companywide manner that directly impacts how he'll be able to work with his coworkers.
Brendan Eich got fired from his CEO position for the offense of privately and silently donating a few thousand dollars to a PAC which was against prop 8.
The above sentence is a fact but I am compelled to write it with a throwaway account since even mentioning the idea that this may have been unfair puts my career at risk. That's how bad it's gotten.
You're right, that's an important difference. However, it doesn't alter the core point about the chilling effect this particular ideology is having. Could you honestly say that someone expressing an equally divisive statement that was in agreement with progressive dogma would be fired? If someone argued in favour of refraining from hiring straight white men until sufficient diversity had been achieved, do you think Google would have fired them?
If they were serious about it (and not in a Jonathan Swift kind of way), perhaps. That said, it is difficult to see how it is equally harmful given how normal straight white men are in society.
If the shoe was on the other foot would we be so quick to write it off? If Google was run by right-wingers and fired LGBT activists would we say "they can do whatever they want since it is their company"? Why do we not allow discrimination on the basis of religion (a belief) but allow it based on political opinion (a belief)?
In his follow-up, he makes the point that producing this sort of list gives a false sense of comfort as (almost by definition) you produce controversial opinions that are nevertheless acceptable to say. I personally have views that are far more controversial than those, and which I am absolutly not willing to post publicly (even pseudo-anonymously).
Having said that (and falling into the de-railing track):
>hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.
How so? I am not an expert (and only have any knowledge of the US system), but aren't hate crimes considered enhancers to existing crimes. That is, to be found guilty of a hate crime, you must also be found guilty of an underlying crime; if you are found not-guilty of the actual crime, then you can not be tried for the hate crime. Being found guilty of a hate crime only serves to increase the severity of punishment for a normal crime that you have been convicted of.
Still, this is a more general issue that hate crimes. Each state (and the federal government) are considered separate entities, which means that double jeopardy does not prohibit being tried for the same crime multiple times, so long as you are being tried by different states (or the federal government). It is not nessasary to have a hate crime for this principle to be invoked. It is also not unreasonable by modern standards to disagree with this; it is just an odditiy of the American legal system that most people never think about.
What you can't say: True democracy doesn't have elections. In fact already the ancient greek knew: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election” (Aristotle, Politics), see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)
> So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Might it be true that women are just naturally much less attracted to STEM than men?
For the record, I think even among men, being attracted to STEM or even good at it is rather rare. It's probably even rarer among women.
EDIT: I wonder if the downvotes are because I'm going offtopic or because I can't say that?
> Might it be true that women are just naturally much less attracted to STEM than men?
No.
In India in 2015, 45% of CS undergrads were women[0]. In the US, in 1984, it was 37%[1], as opposed to 18% in 2010. The downvotes are because you can tell the answer to your question in about 5 minutes of Googling.
I've noticed in third world countries more women go to STEM than in the west. It's probably because of economic or social pressure. There's also no culture of "following your passion"; instead people follow what they think will give them a good career.
There's less economic or social pressure in the west so people tend to choose more to their liking and "follow their passion".
> people tend to choose more to their liking and "follow their passion"
Not to have a go at you personally but this is revealing of a highly middle class bubble that a lot of people are trying to reason from within (including that silly kid at google). It's like a moral and socio-political version of the Blub paradox. It's the same reason that it isn't possible to be racist against whites (in the West) or sexist against men, and why that is hard to understand if you are white or a man (you don't know you are in the privilege bubble and it seems inequitable).
Not having a go at you personally, but saying it's not possible to be racist against whites is an obvious tell that you want to make policies that discriminate against whites, and therefore you are probably racist.
Yeah that's what I thought until a black friend very kindly and patiently spelt it out and it still took me a while. It's counterintuitive and nominally smart people don't get it - and are much more adept at finding justifications as to why their thoughts are right, and taking down anything which challenges that. 'Honky' doesn't carry the offence of 'nigger' and there's a good reason for that. (I'm white and I don't really care what people call me.)
Have you ever considered the option that your black friends was wrong? (Hint: if he was saying you can't be racist against whites, he was wrong and, funny enough, racist.)
Edit: to expand on the above point, the funny thing is, people peddling this kind of bullshit know it's bullshit. For example, feminists want "social justice", and try to redefine "racism" as "institutional racism". But, obiously, by prefixing other adjectives to the words, they're modifying the words themselves - "justice" is just "justice", if you're talking about "social justice", you're obviously not talking about actual "justice", because if you were, you'd simply use the word "justice" without any additional qualifying adjectives. But then, most people respond to emotional arguments way more than to rational arguments, so that's where the war is fought, and it keeps escalating until we get Trump.
> Have you ever considered the option that your black friends was wrong?
Yes of course, it was the first thing I thought and I held onto that. If both parties were on equal ground you would be quite right and there would be equivalence so you could just flip the roles, but they aren't. Middle class white men have greater opportunities in society. Racism and sexism are oppressive by definition, and redressing inequality of opportunity isn't oppression.
And btw talking about institutional racism is the opposite of an emotive argument. It's a more precise way to highlight that the issue is systemic and not the result of individuals being deliberately racist.
But black people are more disadvantaged than white people, so obviously any programme aimed at reducing inequality will have more focus on black people.
That's fine. I'm in strong support of any such program, as long as skin color is not an explicit factor. Such program won't be unfair (e.g. Obama's daughter won't benefit from it, but the poor straight white orphaned guy from the worst neighborhood will), and automatically self-adjusting (at the beginning it will be disproportionately aimed at black people, but eventually - if the programme succeeds - the representation of its beneficiaries will tend to reflect the wider society).
Edit: in other words, if you want to help poor people, help poor people. If you want to help black people, help black people, but don't pretend you're helping poor people, and don't be surprised when you're called racist (like white supremacists, who help white people) or when you receive backlash from non-black people.
Well this is the thing, you can't really discriminate against somebody with privilege, simply by definition. You have to actively promote those who don't in order to come anywhere near a remotely fair and efficient system that gives opportunities to those who qualify on merit.
The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN. As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.
I'd wager good money I'm a lot closer to that Conrad character than the author will ever be and from where I'm sitting it's pretty clear that tech culture has started becoming completely toxic. The article reads as if written by a psychopath (and one begins to wonder whether Evgeny Morozov has a point about SV's movers and shakers). Putting aside the shallow and barely informed notions about fashion and art themselves, dismissing morality as no more than a seasonal fad or craze is itself an unwitting confession of a deep-seated amorality.
>The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN.
When has this happened?
>As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.
Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.
...and hellbanned again for comments in this thread actually. HN doesn't like disturbances to the appearance of right libertarian consensus it would seem.
(That's completely fine in the context of a private community with its own specific set of values but it should be clearly advertised so that participants understand it's not a wider consensus in the world at large and that they aren't getting anything like an open discussion with a range of views.)
I had the impression it started as a kind of joke among progressives in the 70s or so, a ha-ha-only-serious one. Later their opponents appropriated it, in the 80s when I started paying attention.
> Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.
I'm talking about it becoming popularised in contemporary politics. We can all google that it was rebirthed in 87. The reason I know this though is that I remember seeing it coming into common currency after it was repeatedly being used as a hot button term by the GH Bush election campaign team in 88. This was talked about in the broadsheets at the time.
In general also see some other factual problems with his history backdrop arguments as well, besides PC and the arguably simplified popular history version narrative in the retelling of the Galileo Affair.
In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. And published it just before his death. So was Galileo himself deeply embedded in christianity trying to resolve the conflicts within the system. He didn't see himself as heretic, that was a label applied to him by others. The pope actually asked him to pursue his research on heliocentrism on a hypothetical level.
The Ludendorff reference seems overblown at least, as some picked up tidbits by a 3rd party retelling of history. Maybe he mixed it up with the so called Stab-in-the-back myth that happened after the war.
The 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution was never popular with the already quasi-dictatorial OHL, so it never needed a purge in that sense. The events in Russia led people to believe an annexation victory Siegfrieden was possible at some point so the resolution got obsolete at some point.
The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. Huh? So seem Americans if seen from Europe.
Stalin and Hitler (who else of all people not name-dropped yet) are singlehandedly responsible for the claimed demise of representational art, not the advent of photography and film (aren't those two representational by the choice of medium already)? Maybe it simply got boring for artists for a while?
I didn't suffer some gun nuts gladly, what can I say. I think I may have committed the offence of calling them aspergic after they were repeatedly and passively aggressively obtuse lol
OK. Without seeing the original thread, that sounds more like breaking the site's code of conduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has "be civil" and "instead of calling names" right at the start of the section about comment threads. I get angry myself sometimes in arguing with someone here, so I can sympathize.
I suspect this getting up-voted is about the Google engineer's diversity essay. How about instead of framing it in terms of what you can't say politically, let's rephrase it another way:
Imagine you make a post inside your company Slack complaining all your colleagues are stupid and unqualified. You'd probably be reprimanded right?
Didn't that guy basically just do that but only about his female and minority colleagues (and future female and minority colleagues)? Don't we all monitor our words at least a bit at work for the sake of the day going smoothly?
And if he's so correct about Google's diversity initiatives being a problem and/or failure why doesn't he start a company that only hires men to take advantage of the market inefficiency in hiring (if you say hiring laws would get in the way, when is the last time a company paid a serious price for failing to have diverse hires)?
The most upvoted HN comments on threads about the diversity manifesto reek of protecting the status of the people already at the top. And are as flimsy and irrational as they claim the liberal values they decry are. White men have traditionally been in power in this country and suppressed the rights of women & minorities to vote, educate themselves & work for years. How can we know that another group wouldn't be historically more powerful without a control group study where each group is allowed to be a historical oppressor for an equal amount of time?
> Didn't that guy basically just do that but only about his female and minority colleagues
No, actually quite the opposite.
When a company/university/country enshrines diversity quotas, they are basically telling minorities that they are by default stupider than average.
Also, enforcing these diversity quotas will create a (probably valid) impression that minority members who make it anywhere did not do so on their own merit.
As a minority I would much rather know there are no diversity programs so that I know that where ever I get, it's based on my merit, not some charity. Even if I was the only one in the room from my ethnic origin (which is actually often the case).
The only people who will be receptive to working for someone who feels that way about them will only be those who have decided for themselves they are not capable of assessing people objectively either. A less charitable way to put it is these people have decided their own biases are beyond rehabilitation, so these are the people you are selecting for if you hold that view. (In reality, I think people who support these quotas agree with you but think they don't have biases, it's everyone else that can't be trusted. An equally toxic scenario.)
I've never interpreted diversity programs as telling minorities we are stupider. Universities are a great example, wealthier people with more money can afford better educations and test prep for their children. If the "merit" you refer to is manufactured by circumstance, and the circumstances are weighted in favor of the already powerful, why should we accept the status quo & pretend the admissions standard are an objective measurement?
Quotas are a crude tool but I'd rather see something like that than simply accept a world with a cycle of the powerful remaining powerful in large part due to the less powerful never having opportunity.
What makes you think success at high school is related to wealth? I've never noticed any such correlation. My family was not particularly wealthy and I did just fine in school.
You don't need any wealth to enter university. You just need to be smart and get good grades.
The argument is that there is already a discriminatory quota in favour of white men (as any casual inspection of the figures will demonstrate and would require wilful blindness to refute). But none of them are complaining about this of course. They are on the contrary complicit in blissful ignorance of the fact because it is so entrenched it has become institutionalised.
If you come from a disadvantaged position, you have to be better to succeed, not equal. White men don't have it easy but they have it less hard.
So then based on the admittance data Asians have it easiest? Must be due to discrimination in their favor, not because they are pressured to get good grades and do well. Surely you see the hypocrisy of such a position?
On the contrary, growing up white and middle class stacks the odds in your favour in the same way. Many well-off Asian families possibly even more so for the reasons you point out (I spend a lot of time in Asia and know it well). If you are a white middle class male you have better options in education and you are brought up for success, less likely to get arrested and so on - so yes of course you will be more likely to get into a good college and be able to cover costs, and you will be with more people who look and talk like you and that network will be important in getting jobs down the line (or partners and investors for your business). And no, it's still not easy.
But merit is just a table stake and never goes far on its own. Nobody is supposing that companies are occupied by a bunch of white cabbages (although the fact that googleboy got any support really does make me wonder as he was so intellectually vacuous). And it's ingrained into our culture that white men take the top jobs right through business, culture and arts, science, and politics - so the danger is we see it as 'how things are' and assume it's evolved for the best.
But it's completely optional and man-made, and ultimately a political choice, 1. not to have a level playing field when it comes to equality of opportunity and 2. to stack it in that direction. The reality is that tech companies led by women do better and the biggest indicator of ending up poor is having the misfortune to be born poor, so society at large isn't going to fall in by redressing the balance.
And no, fixing a racist and sexist system isn't racism or sexism. The issue many people have here is that they don't recognise it as institutionally racist and sexist in the first place. That's because they are the beneficiaries of the system and cannot see it (I know how hard it is to see past that as I'm one too, and this is why I mention the Blub paradox). You are absolutely right to look at the the figures and point out the number of Asians. We need to check the figures because we can't be objective by just going off our feels (we are a great bunch of guys and love and respect women and don't have a racist bone in our bodies etc). It's a systemic issue, very rarely a personal one (although of course it's personal to all those who are disadvantaged by it).
>The reality is that tech companies led by women do better
Wow, what a sexist thing to say. Ignoring Marissa Mayer for the moment, are you claiming that women are inherently better at something than men? Isn't that a little like claiming that men are better than women at technical roles? That white people are better than black people at building civilization? Seriously, that is a nazi-esque belief you have there. I suggest you reconsider your stance before making claims about one group being better in any way than another.
Lol at you fumbling for anecdota about MM when you hear a fact you don't like. Yes, I'm pointing out that women-owned tech companies financially outperform male-owned tech companies. Data, nothing to do with beliefs. (Men do have terrible academic drop out records by comparison with women and need affirmative remediation themselves in that area, all things being equal.)
Post election, I recall my timelines erupt with emotion -- outrage, despair, betrayal -- then subdue to reflection. Some called for the need to truly reach out to those across the aisle and to listen and understand, earnestly lending an ear even to views that we strongly oppose.
Recent events will be a step back in such relations, as dissent has been dismissed demonstrably without such considerations.
When the people we must understand in order to reach bipartisanship go into hiding for fear of being outed, broadening our perspective becomes difficult.