“Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate,”, DEBRA SOH

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifest o-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/

I will grant you one thing: the media has been sloppy & misportrayed the memo. James Demore put a little more thought into his bigotry than "DIVERSITY SUCKS", and it would have been nice if the media had addressed some of the nuanced distinctions that Demore introduced. They're still bullshit, but mischaracterizing the memo doesn't do anybody any favors.

Sexist, ignorant and a dumb fucking thing to do at work or not, this line of thought is still skating the cube of Eugenics.

I'm guessing this guys' breathless supporters haven't actually read the document in question, just read articles (ESPECIALLY ONES BY WOMEN WHO, EVEN THOUGH INFERIOR, CAN BE ALLOWED TO HAVE SCIENCEY OPINIONS WHEN THEY SAY THINGS I ALREADY AGREE WITH) framing it in a certain way because he most definitely did not just make claims about biology differences between men and women.

It was entirely couched in a lot of pseudo-intellectual garbage, but the document was literally just "negroes cannot be civilized from apes because their skulls are weird shaped" type nonsense from the 1800s appropriated by present-day, perpetually-offended-by-people-who-are-not-them white males. Seriously it's garbage and people defending him are garbage.

But it's important to address the pseudo-intellectual garbage, because many supporters honestly believe that crap. Granted, many just want window dressing for their bigotry, but many others glance at that verbiage and think "Yeah, that checks out." No, it doesn't, and the media does us a disservice by cutting away all his garbage & claiming that his memo said something which it didn't. Not directly, at any rate.

I think his fedora is on too tight.

Would your opinion be the same if it was an opinion at a Catholic hospital that got them fired? Say, talking about how workplace healthcare should cover birth control?

Or a Chik-Fil-A manager fired for saying gays are human?

When this was passed around the office the other day, had eyerolling made a noise, it would've been deafening.

|Violates your company's stated cultural values."

I've seen people pull some spectacular bullshit out of their asses, but THAT...

If you think about it, all this would have been unnecessary if our country had been smart about the practice of limiting the influx of shiftless, impulsive, and easily excited Italians.

But no, we had to throw open our borders and this is what we got.

I haven't read the memo, but I do know that if you're some employee that has responsibility X and you start sounding off on policy Y when policy Y is other people's domain and responsibility, you're going to make a lot of enemies very quickly.

And if this guy really believed in the points he was making, good for him. He can take the job loss like martyr, as a person who protested a Catholic hospital's take on birth control might. They might at least be bright enough to see their dismissal coming a mile off. But, "open company culture" or not, there's no way in heck that the guy could expect to be patted on the head for offering his completely unsolicited opinions in a very public manner about hiring decisions he probably has no role in at all. That ain't no way to survive during your journey up the corporate ladder, and if you don't know that, you're a fool.

He wrote an essay of common sense observations & had the empirical evidence back it up. Simple, huh?

What evidence?

Yeah, what evidence? He described several differences between the sexes, and then simply asserted to they were due to inherent biology.... without providing any evidence whatsoever. Researchers in several fields have looked into many of those differences and shown that they're largely socially conditioned.... and even within our social conditioning, there's so much variety as to make such generalizations nigh-useless.

By the way, whenever your main argument is "it's common sense", alarm bells should be ringing. "It's common sense" is usually another way of saying "It's what I believe and I have no way to support those beliefs." I know, James Demore didn't fall back on "common sense"... he fell back on other empty arguments. But all the arguments are empty, all the way down.

From a quick search, it seems women make up about 25% of CS graduates while also making up over half of all college graduates. How does a social constructionist handle that? Are you saying that, despite being over-represented in college, women are being socially conditioned out of the CS field? Because if that's wrong and they are just expressing their preference, pressuring them into CS programs isn't obviously an ethical thing to do.

As far as I know, researchers are still looking into why women are so underrepresented in CS, so we don't have a clear answer. However, based on testimonies from women & initial studies, it sounds like the main reason is that CS students & CS employees tend to be very hostile to women. So CS has a bad reputation among women, and those who choose to enter the field anyways are often drummed out or not given a helping hand that often starts successful careers.

This problem is common across all STEM, but it seems to be strongest In CS for reasons I don't understand. I don't even have a preliminary explanation for why it's worse in CS.

When it comes to tech, certain sub disciplines have marked differences in representation.
In my 8 year stint in various syseng roles at MS, all but one of those roles had a DBA team that was either entirely or majority women. BI/Data analysis roles seem to have a similar pattern.

"Common sense observations" such as "When girls do my job better than me I get scared."

Let's not forget that the percentage of programmers who were women used to be around 100%. From the day Countess Ada Lovelace invented computer programming up until roughly the 50's, it was considered a feminine field and undervalued accordingly. ENIAC was programmed entirely by women. Everything James Damore did in his professional life was building on a foundation laid by people he considers biologically unsuited to work in the field they created.

Having legal protections for being a woman, person of color or homosexual are rights, enshrined in the law.

There are no rights to a six-figure salaried position at Google, however, so I guess if that doesn't work for you, sure.

They didn't' fire him "for disagreeing". They fired him for (re)raising discriminatory arguments that have been debunked every which way from Sunday. His arguments are complete bullshit; they're akin to arguing that global warming isn't happening, or that blacks are better runners because they have an extra muscle in their butt. You can be a bigoted idiot on your own time, I guess, but when you circulate such a memo at work, it *does* cross a line; it creates a hostile work environment for women.

No, they fired him for disagreeing, and his "opinions" are actually pretty well backed up by academia.

No, they didn't, and no they aren't.

You know, if you're going to enter a discussion, you'll have to do better than just asserting you're right.

He sent a big public memo. He embarrassed the company. He revealed himself to be the scum bag tech bro that Google doesn't want to be associated as.

BTW, tech bros are most often libertarians. They deserve to get canned.

That's all you've been doing, and in the most juvenile way possible.

Anaxagoras: you're wrong, and I'm right.

Room for rent: Renting out 1BR 2nd floor apartment at Mr Charrington's Second Hand Shop, Prole District, section 4. Independent thought welcome!

Actually, it was NOT cancelled because"because the guy who initially raised them was summarily fired". It was cancelled because of online harassment:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall-m eeting-canceled-online-harassment

"The cancellation of the town hall meeting caps off nearly a week of escalating anxiety around the targeted harassment of various Google employees. Very shortly after Motherboard first reported the existence of a controversial memo circulating inside Google, the memo’s author was identified as James Damore. (Damore was fired on Monday). Since then, various corners of the internet have targeted Googlers who have been openly critical of the memo. "

No, it was cancelled becuase they knew it would be a shit show and anyone speaking up in Damore's defence would end up mob-attacked themselves. But they can't say that, so they blamed Internet trolls.

No it was fucking cancelled because chuds like you guys were actively doxxing female and PoC google workers after Milo the ped posted twitter bios of some of them to his fb followers.

In light of these comments, I amend my statement thusly.

"Google was going to have a town hall meeting on the issues. Everyone was so terrified of the consequences of such a discussion, that no one was willing to come. Thus the meeting was cancelled".

I like that, actually. It illustrates the point without the usual tribal identifications getting in the way of the issue.

>I'm looking forward to when power inevitably shifts back to the right

Wait, you mean it hasn't?

Give it a few years, your current persecution complex is going to seem quaint.

This was a pretty good read. I would think "the dogmatic mind" would have been a better title.

https://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-Bu rke/dp/0199959110

One of the more telling chapters mentions excerpts from Hitler mentioning how young communist members showed more promise as SA recruits than moderates, knowing that most of them were angry people looking to join a cause and bash heads in for it. Flipping them to do the same thing under a different radical flag was seen as easier than convincing a moderate to become a radical. If there's anything dogmatists hate more than a competing dogma, it's people who don't buy into one at all. You see it all the time the extreme hatred the religious right has for atheists.

And that leads us to the ultimate modern day irony of ANTIFA claiming to fight fascism by dressing up in black and bludgeoning opposition rallies. Anyone not on board with that is labeled a nazi sympathizer (i.e. people who merely say it's not cool to physically assault people because of words no matter what). There is no room for anything but 2 extreme us vs them views and anyone outside that gets lumped in with "them".

Everyone is really going out of their way to ignore the fact that important things are being run and decided on by people with the emotional maturity of an angry teenager and who think that 'tech bros' are a legitimate threat to their well-being.

Dude, I like you, and I agree that a certain vocal wing of the SJW/identity left is wacky and bad.

But if you're really going to go in on the "ANTIFA ARE JUST AS BAD" narrative, I really have to wonder if you've been paying attention to the uses of deadly force as well as actual body counts here.

Nominal and co as usual being fucking nazi apologist cunts.

What a surprise. But yeah antifa are the ones running over protestors and burning mosques etc, totally both sides are the same guys.

Fucking morons.

I don't agree with the antifa types who feel that you should punch Nazis just for saying "I'm a Nazi". I think that goes just a little too far and it can easily be repurposed into attacking minorities (for example any black person who gets frustrated with white America / the police / whatever and says the wrong thing).

But the big problem remains the Right, which has been feeling increasingly comfortable letting its worst elements run rampant. There is no comparison between the two sides, except in abstractions that people try very very hard to not connect itself to real-world events.

It's been supplanted by narrative. Didn't you get Lacan's memo?

Demore's presentation addresses this idea on page 1 and throughout.

I can only conclude that by raising this point, Hazelnut, you also deserve to be stripped of your livelihood and hanged in the court of public opinion.

Yes, it addressed it, but it did so badly. For one, you have to be very careful when moving from generalizations about population to policy that will affect individuals. He didn't show that care, instead choosing to do the same sloppy generalization -> policy thing that bigots love. "Well, we can't give blacks the vote because, on average, they're fucking stupid." Well maybe they're "stupid" because you've brutalized them and haven't educated them.

For another, he actually insisted that fundamental mental differences between men & women are biologically based. Very few, if any, of the mental differences (which include behavior, intelligence, aptitudes, attitudes, and all other phenomenon like that) actually do appear "across cultures", as he suggests. In other words, he got that point dead wrong. He also lists a lot of differences without ever proving that they're biologically based (as he claims) or societally/culturally based. And some of the ones he listed have been shown to be primarily culturally based. Others we don't have research on yet, because such studies are both expensive & difficult to do. So he got that point at least partially wrong.

In short, the guy is full of shit, and didn't do his homework. And he presented his dumb ideas w/out any awareness of past discussions or emotional intelligence. In short, he's a piss poor representative for Google and it's a good thing they canned his sorry ass.

Anaxagoras, Demore didn't say anything about blacks being stupid, so I'll assume you used that example because you couldn't be bothered to pull a quote from the doc to support your claim that he's proposing bigoted policies based on sloppy generalizations. I'm not asking you to go quote-mining now (I'm sure you have better things to do), and I agree with the gist of your critique, but equating him with some sort of 19th-century slave owner is the exact, lazy thing the media has done with this story in general, and as you pointed out elsewhere it doesn't do anyone any good. It's crazy how quick we are on that trigger. You either share my views or you deny blacks the right to vote. Bang bang.

I mean, "The Adventures of James Demore and His Half-Assed Arguments About Gender Inequity in the Tech Field" is not a story I want to rally myself to. He doesn't deserve to galvanize people who are frustrated with "progressive liberalism" (or whatever we're calling it this week); he tried to cram way too many controversial ideas into too small a space, and just wasn't up to the challenge. You're right that his ideas are leaky. That's probably because they're received second- and third-hand from elsewhere.

That said, one thing he's right about is the open hostility that is now permitted toward those who don't swallow progressive liberalism wholesale. Reporters and bloggers felt comfortable misrepresenting his ideas, and readers gleefully went along with it because, hey, he's just a bad guy, right? He doesn't deserve accuracy in the media any more than an accused rapist deserves the presumption of innocence in a courtroom. Google felt confident enough in their reading of public opinion to come down hard and fire him. That says a lot. Any time a company makes the news, they stand to gain or lose respect from the public. They decided the heroic move here was to fire someone who presented an alternate interpretation of gender inequity in business, even though he conceded over and over that diversity is good, businesses should have policies which encourage women in STEM fields, and the direction (if not the course) of Google is morally correct. For that misstep, just fire the guy and bask in the general cheer.

Now the rest of us get to feel righteous for calling this guy an inhuman piece of shit and delighting in his ruined career. "Fuck off back where you came from, dudebro." But, for what? Presenting some dissenting arguments about gender and business? It raises the question of what monolith he's dissenting from. Is it now a given that a business should have inflexible views regarding the interactions of biology, gender, education, business, and society?

Fire someone for grabbing asses, using slurs, promoting boys over girls, spreading gossip, denying maternity leave pay, fine. But are we really comfortable with firing people for holding different social values or presenting leaky arguments?

I don't agree with most of Demore's little tirade, but he spends a lot of his document venting frustration with a perceived ideological authority, and that I can relate to. And unfortunately for all of us, Google proved him correct by acting like one. "Unfortunate" because now he'll probably pivot into a career as a touring conservative speaker, and we'll never hear the end of the little shit.

It's fucking modern day phrenology based on absolutely nothing but assumptions, it's been debunked by statisticians and scientists of all kinds but yeah why lets facts get in the way of you fucking goofs oiling up your calipers to start measuring skull circumferences again.

This place man, wew.

And the award for Best Idiot goes to James DeMore in "Man Getting Fired by Google."

Another good article:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/11/16130452/google-mem o-women-tech-biology-sexism

Equality of outcome is pretty much a straw man. I mean, who even wants that?

In 2016, Twitter announced a target of 17 percent women in tech and 25 percent women in leadership positions. It doesn't take a lot of math to determine that seventeen per cent is not equality of outcome. It's modest. It's reasonable. It doesn't cut men out. 83 per cent? 75 per cent? Wow, no wonder white males are so angry! Let's all get together and sing "we shall overcome"!

>>>I'm not reading some tech bro manifesto, but in general, diversity quotas are pretty flawed and shallow.

Compared to what? If you remove the conscious institutional prejudice of 17 per cent, is that really the end of prejudice, or is it possible that you're just substituting the random prejudices of whoever's doing the hiring, and when I'm prejudiced about something, it's usually more than 17 per cent of the time.

I didn't really believe in white privilege before, but now that I've seen so much more outrage about a white man losing his job than I've ever seen about an unarmed black man being shot dead by police, you can call me a believer.

"I didn't really believe in white privilege before, but now that I've seen so much more outrage about a white man losing his job than I've ever seen about an unarmed black man being shot dead by police, you can call me a believer."

The disappointing thing is, it's not coming only from Republican troglodytes. You expect Archie Bunker to be terrible when it comes to race and gender, but when Michael Stivic is saying the same things only slightly less forthrightly, it's a red flag.

THIS

How you managed to arrive at unarmed black men being murdered is impressive.

I'm not defending what this guy said, because I haven't read it. Either have you, JHMF, but you're off to the races. Maybe this is emblematic of the chord this guy may have struck with the public. Personally, I don't care, I'm a die-hard bing user.

>>>I'm not defending what this guy said, because I haven't read it. Either have you, JHMF, but you're off to the races.

Nothing I said was in response to him. The last paragraph was in response to a whole bunch of whiny internet trolls. Everything else that I said was in response to you.

>>>How you managed to arrive at unarmed black men being murdered is impressive.

I'm not suggesting a causality. I'm trying to bring some perspective to this idea that a white guy losing his job (or being dissed by a woman) is the greatest injustice ever.

You know what? And pardon the digression, but there really are feminists who hate men... because, why wouldn't there be? I've encountered some of these women, and they didn't like me, either. They were rude to me. I didn't like that at all. But I dug deep, and I found the strength to carry on.

Checkmate

It seems to me that this isn't about corporations being noble and progressive, it's about adding value. If men and women really are different, (survey says yes) that's why having 17 per cent of the tech force female, and 25 per cent of leadership female, could be an important asset for a company that is trying to provide a service to women as well as men. Even if the candidates aren't all the most qualified in terms of skills, a gender diverse workforce could still be more qualified AS A WHOLE to meet and anticipate the needs of a gender-diverse customer base.You want women right there, designing and deciding next to the men. I don't think there's any substitute for that.

Reported for irony.