Thursday, August 10, 2017

A Few Further Comments on the Very Confused Fired Googler James Damore



With all the brouhaha over the firing of Google employee James Damore, it strikes me as remarkable the lack of commentary over the fact that Damore's paper, that resulted in his firing, indicates that he has been captured in many ways by the Social Justice Warrior mind set that he objects to.

For example, he writes in his paper:
I strongly  believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should have more.
But why is diversity put on such a high altar, even by Damore?

I live in San Francisco which is a very diverse city and I like being around people of different cultures but I see no need to demand diverse practices of others or to think it is some kind of great universal good. If people want to be around their own, what is wrong with this?

The last time I was at 47th Street Photo in New York City, it appeared that all the employees were orthodox Jews in conservative dress. So what? I was there to buy a camera and they had good deals. Why should I care if the owner only hires those that are like him? If an exchange works for me, I make it. if it doesn't I don't. Do I really have to give a test of the views of all those I do exchanges with before I do an exchange? Do I have to look at the ethnic mix, cultural views and sexual mix of the employees of a firm before I do an exchange? Do I really need to demand diversity from the New York Knicks basketball team that I cheer? Do I need to demand that they put on the court more whites, more Jews, more lesbians?

And this goes for Google, by the way, if they want to create an environment that is Social Justice Warrior intense, why should I care? I am only interested in their search engine and other services. I really don't care if their programmers are white males or transgender Puerto Rican midgets. As long as they provide quality services, I will stick with them, when they don't I will move on. I really don't care about their views on what kind of a mix of employees they should have.

Damore in his paper also presents a chart of what he claims are the differences in "biases" between the Left and the Right. But he is very confused here.

He lists as "compassion for the weak" as a Left bias but this is a misunderstanding of the nature of compassion, Lefties may want more government intervention to aide the weak, but some conservatives may be against this not because they are less compassionate but becasue they hold the view that the weak are best helped by free markets rather than government interventions.

He lists the Left as Open. One has to ask is he serious? Has he seen how the Left has shut down conservative speakers on campuses across the country?

And he claims on his chart that the Left holds that "humans are inherently cooperative." But the Left is about gaining central power to force the will of those in control on everyone while the anti-leftist limited government advocate appreciates the inherently cooperative nature of mankind and the lack of necessity for a central power to enforce against naturally cooperative behavior.

Damore also seems to buy into the concept of microaggressions. He writes:
Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive...
He is implying here that such transgressions actually do exist when what is mostly going on is that words and figures of speech are distorted by Social Justice Warriors to suggest hostile meanings for what is said, meanings  that don't really exist. The only aggressions here are by the SJW phrase distorters that want to start trouble. In other words, the only term I will grant is a microaggression is the word microaggression itself.

It should also be noted that Damore is considering appealing to the Labor Department because his "rights" have been violated. But here he is calling on a state body, that is a great enforcer of SJW regulations at corporations, to help him against a former employer that doesn't want him. That is, when all is said and done, he, himself, is not against using the tool of Lefty style central control when it suits his interests to force an exchange with a former employer that no longer wants to have anything to do with him.

Bottom Line: The Social Justice Warrior mind set is so ingrained in much of modern day American thinking that a man is hailed as an anti-SJW hero who carries the banner for a lot of SJW propaganda

Further, marches are now being planned on Google offices by so-called anti-SJW protesters who want to demand that their social and culture views be adopted by Google.

Freedom is not about demanding anyone act or hold any views, no matter how sound or wacky they may be. It is about live and let live.

-RW

UPDATE

The Way the World Works [Fired Google Employee Goes Radioactive]


20 comments:

  1. In the 10 page document, Damon notes that there are programs at Google only available to women and minorities. As an employee, he is more impacted by the PC nonsense than a user of Google's products.

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  2. Can we agree that the PC nonsense is inherently un-libertarian because it assesses people by their membership of a group. And can we agree as company cultures becomes infected with it, it is less likely that an ordinary person will vote for a libertarian candidate?

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    1. There is nothing unlibertarian about assessing people by group membership so long as you do so without aggression or coercion.

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    2. So the fact that a person may identify as a member of a group is unlibertarian? How so?

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    3. Instead of 'assess' I should have written 'grants rights to'.
      I bet if the author had turned out to be a woman, she wouldn't have been fired.

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    4. There is no "right to a job" though, so it wouldn't matter if the female author wasn't fired and the male author was. Freedom of association means that Google should be just as free to fire James and not fire a female authoring the same work, as James and the female are free to quit or not quit depending on how they feel about working at Google.

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  3. Any employer should be able to fire any employee for any reason. Any employee should be free to quit any job for any reason. Its called consent and its how rational adults live on earth.

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  4. The problem is that Google's SJW culture reaches into their search engine results with active omissions of websites deemed to promote BadThink. Google is becoming more and more like a Public Utility like Ma Bell back in the day. Maybe they should be regulated as such?

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    1. Bingo! This is exactly the issue. We have become as dependent on search engines as on phones and electricity and the culture of search engine companies is politically influencing the services they provide to society. It's time to make them into regulated utilities, specifically including removing their arbitrary powers of censorship

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    2. OR ... if there is sufficient demand for them, competitive search engines that don't censor these viewpoints could begin to compete.

      Why would the answer be to give further power to the state? All you'd be doing is substituting the views of those at the state for those at Google, and giving the state the ability (through licensing) to forcibly prohibit further competition from developing.

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    3. The NAPster,

      On paper Google and similar institutions (let's not call them companies) are "private" but in practice they are powerful participants in the system. You are just looking at their formal status as private companies, and not their real status as enforcers for the regime.

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    4. @The NAPster

      Well said. Although it's kind of sad that this actually needs to be explained to people on a libertarian blog.

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    5. Matt, even if what you say is true, why would Unknown's solution of handing full, formal control to the state -- not only over censorship, but also entrance -- be a better situation than what we have at present?

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    6. The NAPster,

      The state is using these platforms as a method of censorship, evading what restrictions have been placed on state power. So essentially you will have "free speech" but you won't be able to exercise it anywhere.

      You need to look beyond formalities. Libertarians are becoming irrelevant because they refuse to look at reality.

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    7. Matt:

      I'm confused about your position. You don't like the state exercising power, but your solution is to willingly give the state more power? Isn't the solution to encourage more renegade, private solutions? Is the state controlling Target Liberty, Bionic Mosquito, Mises.org and similar sites?

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    8. Don't be confused. Open your eyes and see.

      The state in your view is at the top of a pyramid. That is a distorted view. The state is one part of a system, and if you must view it as a pyramid then place the state one level lower that the than "the system", the nebulous number of organizations and institutions that control our society.

      It's part of managerialism, one aspect of which is the state but also includes ostensibly private institutions.

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    9. Matt, I don't view society as organized in any particular geometric shape. I view the state as being the one entity in society which claims (and is generally accepted by statists as having) a monopoly on the use of force. Only the state can openly and without fear of retribution coerce individuals to (a) hand over part of their income, or yield their other property, to fund endeavors favored by the state, and (b) do things or refrain from doing things with their property (including their bodies) that they might otherwise not want to do.

      Yes, there are private institutions that partner with the state to rent the state's coercive powers, and to that extent they are also problematic. But the issue is the state's coercive powers, not those institutions per se, and that is what I take libertarians to be fighting against.

      If a larger swathe of society rejected the state's legitimacy in its use of force, then these partnering private institutions ("cronies of the state") would be on their own, and would either survive or go out of business based on whether they offered sufficient value to voluntarily paying consumers.

      Until that time, I think there is great value in individuals shunning cronies of the state in favor of other private institutions.

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  5. The diversity issue as framed by leftists has always amused me. They would look at a group comprising Barack Obama (white African-American), Sonia Sotomayor (Latina), Elizabeth Warren (native American), Hillary Clinton (white female) and Steven Chu (Asian-American) as diverse. Yet does anyone really think that there would be much daylight among their views on most issues? And if they all have similar opinions, how can this type of diversity be additive to any process, which is the justification the left usually gives for wanting diversity?

    If they wanted to add one more member to the group to increase diversity, do you think they'd pick Chuck Schumer or some redneck from the Deep South?

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  6. I don't understand why companies provide online bulletin board platforms for employees to discuss topics that aren't related to the work they're doing in the first place.

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    1. To harass white males. And if white males are not being harassed, then somehow it is discriminatory against PoC, women, homos etc.

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