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Google vs. The Alt-Right

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Posts

  • NotarussianbotNotarussianbot Registered User regular
    hippofant wrote: »
    Zibblsnrt wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    And, a lot of these issues aren't classically political issues. Gender etc.

    ... When was that ever not political?

    (Note that "the default system doesn't care about this thing" or "I'm comfortable with the default re: this thing" doesn't mean "this thing isn't political.")

    Not during the Roman Empire! (Wikipedia quotation.)
    The question of Elagabalus' sexual orientation is confused, owing to salacious and unreliable sources. Elagabalus married and divorced five women,[47] three of whom are known. His first wife was Julia Cornelia Paula;[45] the second was the Vestal Virgin Julia Aquilia Severa.[45][50]

    Within a year, he abandoned her and married Annia Aurelia Faustina,[45] a descendant of Marcus Aurelius and the widow of a man he had recently had executed. He had returned to his second wife Severa by the end of the year.[47] According to Cassius Dio, his most stable relationship seems to have been with his chariot driver, a blond slave from Caria named Hierocles, whom he referred to as his husband.[38]

    The Augustan History claims that he also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna, in a public ceremony at Rome.[51] Cassius Dio reported that Elagabalus would paint his eyes, depilate his body hair and wear wigs before prostituting himself in taverns, brothels,[52] and even in the imperial palace:
    Finally, he set aside a room in the palace and there committed his indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, and shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while in a soft and melting voice he solicited the passers-by. There were, of course, men who had been specially instructed to play their part. For, as in other matters, so in this business, too, he had numerous agents who sought out those who could best please him by their foulness. He would collect money from his patrons and give himself airs over his gains; he would also dispute with his associates in this shameful occupation, claiming that he had more lovers than they and took in more money.[53]

    Herodian commented that Elagabalus enhanced his natural good looks by the regular application of cosmetics.[45] He was described as having been "delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the queen of Hierocles" and was reported to have offered vast sums of money to any physician who could equip him with female genitalia.[39] Elagabalus has been characterized by some modern writers as transgender or transsexual.[54][55][56]

    Whoa, you went deep on that one *golf clap*

  • NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    Phyphor wrote: »
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    Meeqe wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    Are you going to write some titanic corporate handbook saying what people can and can't say?

    Um... yes? Every corporate job I've ever been at had a HUGE employee handbook. Its such a common staple of such jobs that its been the butt of jokes for decades. And you have to have one to make sure that employees know what the rules are, because if employees/management break employment laws the company can be held legally liable! This isn't just a matter of what works/doesn't work in terms of managing the culture at a job, its a matter of legal compliance, because guess what! Doing things that are racist/sexist to your employees/coworkers is frequently illegal!

    This entire conversation about what companies can and should do is incomplete with talking about the legal protections put in place during the civil rights era, almost all of which that I know have been upheld repeatedly in court. Its not just wrong to be bigoted on a job site, its frequently illegal. The words hostile work environment are the things that haunt HR and Legal's nightmares.

    Oh come on now, lets not pretend this is some 'solved problem' from the past where only foolish young tech folk have an issue. Here is the solution that existed in that weighty old 1950's handbook you joked about..

    1) Welcome aboard
    2) Tacitly, shut the hell up, don't talk about your views. We've done our best to hire people who all think the same, but if you've slipped through the cracks, then shut the hell up.
    3) What if someone asks me about my views? Shut the hell up
    4) What if I want to express my views? Shut the hell up
    5) What if the company does something I don't like? Quit

    And?

    Nobody is paying you to air your opinions out everywhere.

    If anything this sounds freaking great.

    My career in tech is literally about having opinions on things and pointing out stuff that will concern people. You can't divorce tech from the sociopolitical scene.

    Depends on the tech but yeah, you absolutely can.

    I don't need to worry about sociopolitical crap when I'm plowing through DNS logs or scripting in python.

    Tech doesn't want to divorce itself, but it absolutely can.

    My entire career has been sociopolitically agnostic. There aren't really any implications to writing and interfacing with drivers and implementing protocols
    Facial recognition software not seeing people of color, because all the people used to create and test the drivers and protocols are white.
    Politics do not need to be obvious to be there.
    Sure this is an extreme example, but yes, writing and interfacing with drivers and implementing drivers can be very political.

  • AstaerethAstaereth In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
    Any person who interacts with other people as part of their job, or interacts with something that interacts with other people as part of its operation, may find their political views impacting others through their work.

    So pretty much everybody.

    ACsTqqK.jpg
  • MrMisterMrMister Jesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered User regular
    edited February 2018
    It's been a while, but here are some thoughts I had in response to the NLRB letter for Damore's firing (thoughts which I think are also relevant to this recent discussion):

    My understanding from the NLRB letter: the law protects workers who organize for better conditions. The law doesn't protect workers who discriminate or contribute to discriminatory environments, the slightly less loaded way of describing the cancerous bigots ostensibly starring in this thread.

    If a worker is both protected in one way, and not in another, then the law says that the company is in the clear for firing them, so long as they are firing them on the basis of the non-protected ground. This is simple enough in some of the NLRB letter citations. "Fuck the boss, they're a (slur)" may be an attempt to organize the workers, but it's also an instance of workplace discrimination and you can get fired for that.

    That all seems okay to me, but what I have trouble with is the current thread of discussion--where criticism of the company's diversity policies is itself ipso facto bigotry, and, correspondingly, also to the NLRB letter's reference to Damore's "polite" and "cloaked" bigotry. Here's the thing about polite and cloaked bigotry: there's no clear intellectual standard for it, so far as I can tell. As an example, take the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action (AA), and on whether AA is either a necessary corrective for or just another instance of discrimination. These decisions have been narrow, and the rationale has been, imo, pretty stupid. The celebrated Bakke v California and consequent Grutter v Bollinger--5 to 4, and you're allowed to count being a minority favorably but not institute explicit point systems? "You're allowed to count it favorably, but not give it points" is pretty close to incoherent, imo, and it's been, then and now, a compromise rationale resting on a razor's edge.

    But in this context, what the "real racism" versus "polite racism" is, well that's very close to being a matter of which of those 5 or 4 you agree with.

    When you're thinking about someone at a workplace, who's mad and who wants to criticize their boss, I think it's wrong to extend "don't call your boss (slur)" to "don't criticize a program which, according to five of nine SCOTUS justices, is okay." The basic worry here is that it sides entirely with the employer. We shouldn't expect an average worker to be able to express their grievance in exactly the words of a legal/academic elite--especially when the legal/academic ultra-elites can't even agree on how it's supposed to be said. The de facto effect of "there's an ungrounded, intellectually nebulous standard, and we defer to the employer in their good faith efforts (because, after all, they're liable for hostile environments)" is just that employers get to do whatever they want. And this is what we saw in Google's disciplining of left wing critics, which was decried in this thread a few pages ago; if they really get legal deference, then that's them exercising it too.

    In any case, I'll close with an anecdote. I was on a hiring committee in the recent-ish past. That committee wound up passing over a woman I thought we absolutely should have given the job to. She was, frankly, better than anyone we had working for us, with respect to the things she did. And I thought the most likely explanation of our failure to hire her was sexism in action, due to stereotypes about women and math. We also had another woman candidate who I thought made it much farther than she deserved to, because we wanted to hire a woman--a rationale that was clearly expressed by everyone involved (despite the fact that clearly expressing this rationale was illegal according to our legal advice; we realized we could ignore the legal advice by mutual consent and no one could do anything about it). The upshot of this hiring process, for me, as a pleb who didn't get to make real decisions but did get to shadow them, was: 'discrimination against (some) women' and 'unjust preference for (some) women' can absolutely co-exist. You can both have a real problem with discriminating against a group and also some awful (and possibly illegal!) corporate policies in general favor of the same group!

    In subsequent time I haven't had an experience so dramatic, but I have been involved in hiring situations where what we could or couldn't, should or shouldn't say about diversity was radically undefined--and that it was undefined wound up being license for the dumbest, most senior people who felt most comfortable in the cultural atmosphere to just shoot their mouths off. And they often wound up doing that in a way that didn't represent a clean liberal/conservative divide, or anything, just their scattershot memories or personal prejudices.

    No one should be so confident that worker power vs employee standards maps so neatly onto their liberal/conservative ideological standards.

    MrMister on
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • Giggles_FunsworthGiggles_Funsworth Blight on Discourse Bay Area SprawlRegistered User regular
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    Meeqe wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    Are you going to write some titanic corporate handbook saying what people can and can't say?

    Um... yes? Every corporate job I've ever been at had a HUGE employee handbook. Its such a common staple of such jobs that its been the butt of jokes for decades. And you have to have one to make sure that employees know what the rules are, because if employees/management break employment laws the company can be held legally liable! This isn't just a matter of what works/doesn't work in terms of managing the culture at a job, its a matter of legal compliance, because guess what! Doing things that are racist/sexist to your employees/coworkers is frequently illegal!

    This entire conversation about what companies can and should do is incomplete with talking about the legal protections put in place during the civil rights era, almost all of which that I know have been upheld repeatedly in court. Its not just wrong to be bigoted on a job site, its frequently illegal. The words hostile work environment are the things that haunt HR and Legal's nightmares.

    Oh come on now, lets not pretend this is some 'solved problem' from the past where only foolish young tech folk have an issue. Here is the solution that existed in that weighty old 1950's handbook you joked about..

    1) Welcome aboard
    2) Tacitly, shut the hell up, don't talk about your views. We've done our best to hire people who all think the same, but if you've slipped through the cracks, then shut the hell up.
    3) What if someone asks me about my views? Shut the hell up
    4) What if I want to express my views? Shut the hell up
    5) What if the company does something I don't like? Quit

    And?

    Nobody is paying you to air your opinions out everywhere.

    If anything this sounds freaking great.

    My career in tech is literally about having opinions on things and pointing out stuff that will concern people. You can't divorce tech from the sociopolitical scene.

    Depends on the tech but yeah, you absolutely can.

    I don't need to worry about sociopolitical crap when I'm plowing through DNS logs or scripting in python.

    Tech doesn't want to divorce itself, but it absolutely can.

    Idk dude. There is a lot of ways that logging can be used for harm that interface with society and politics.

    And I'd argue enforced silence is just a way to keep the underclasses in check. Talking about religion, politics, salaries, etc. is bad for the status quo because the status quo is fucked up. The more ignorance and non-communication and misunderstanding the better. I vastly prefer knowing who the bigots in my org are so they don't make it to management.

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    edited February 2018
    MrMister wrote: »
    That all seems okay to me, but what I have trouble with is the current thread of discussion--where criticism of the company's diversity policies is itself ipso facto bigotry, and, correspondingly, also to the NLRB letter's reference to Damore's "polite" and "cloaked" bigotry. Here's the thing about polite and cloaked bigotry: there's no clear intellectual standard for it, so far as I can tell. As an example, take the Supreme and Appellate Court decisions on affirmative action, and on whether AA is either a necessary corrective for or just another instance of discrimination. These decisions have been narrow, and the rationale has been, imo, pretty stupid. The celebrated Bakke v California and consequent Grutter v Bollinger--5 to 4, and you're allowed to count being a minority favorably but not institute explicit point systems? "You're allowed to count it favorably, but not give it points" is pretty close to incoherent, imo, and it's been, then and now, a compromise rationale resting on a razor's edge.

    Said compromise purely exists not because there's really any confusion about the value of programs like affirmative action, but because there's a conservative faction within our legal system and culture that is manifestly for the support of white supremacy, but is also smart enough that they know that they have to cloak said support in ways that make it palatable to society as a whole. It's incoherent, yes - because it was pushed to being so by people who wanted to wreck the system without being seen as doing so.

    Edit: Remember, our current Chief Justice made his bones in the GOP by being Reagan's hatchetman against the Voting Rights Act. His predecessor made his bones by being a "poll watcher" and using the law to disenfranchise minorities.

    AngelHedgie on
    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    Ideals are impossibilities.

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
  • AstaerethAstaereth In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
    There’s a difference between saying “I disagree with this specific diversity policy because I think the cause of diversity is better served by [other thing]” and saying “I disagree with this specific diversity policy because science says [group] is inferior,” and the latter is what Damore did.

    ACsTqqK.jpg
  • DedwrekkaDedwrekka Metal Hell adjacentRegistered User regular
    tbloxham wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    TryCatcher wrote: »
    Which is why most business go out of their way to avoid "discourse" on the workplace as much as possible. Because IS EASIER and makes sure that everybody just gets their damn paycheck without issue.

    To which the counterpoint would be that there are issues which we need to actually discuss and fix, but it's certainly not as easy as just saying "Tech companies are infested with Bigots and should fire them all!"

    Tech companies tend to encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to 'have a corporate philosophy'. But this causes the bigots to speak up too, which is a challenge, because if you are going to let people speak up at work then you have to at least let the bigots speak a little bit.

    Other companies 'seem' better, because their corporate philosophy is "Shut up, we donate to everyone on every side. Keep your politics at home"

    Right wing companies also sometimes 'seem better', because while they have a corporate policy, their employees are told to shut their mouths if they don't agree 100% with it. Which silences left wing dissenters who might say, "Maybe our receptionists shouldn't all be hired because of their bra size", but also silences far right folks who might say, "The fact that any of our receptionists are non white is an outrage!"

    No, you don't. The problem with your argument is that you're applying a false equivalence to the viewpoints, and in so doing argue that we have to be tolerant of intolerance. But that's not how we should be viewing tolerance, and as such we are not obligated to let bigots spew bigotry.

    And again, notice how this forum functions. Right wing thought is not silenced by the mods as the 'thought police' as you are proposing a company should do. Instead, people are prevented from spouting ideas which cannot be supported by argument.

    For example, the level of 'counter argument' that I would say you have to tolerate is...

    "Women in Engineering is a distraction from the work we need to get done here at this company. They shouldn't need special groups to isolate them from the rest of the group and get special benefits"

    whereas

    "Women are incapable of doing engineering work. We should get rid of every woman on an engineering team"

    would be grounds for dismissal. And yes, some people who would like to say the latter, will just dance around it by saying the former, but that's just the price you have to pay to actually have a discussion.

    Except that it's not you paying the price. It's all the people who get targeted by that sort of comment. In the original thread on the screed, a few female posters talked about how dealing with the atmosphere that these comments create is draining on them, making them feel like they have to justify their position, over and over. So no, giving bigots cover is not the price to pay, because the starting point is that everybody here has worth.

    Now, you'll say that means that certain discussions are off the table. To which my response is simply "Yes, and why should they be on it?" We should have a very high bar for allowing any sort of discussion which puts someone's worth on the table because of their race, gender, creed, or any other aspect of their identity.

    But having a discussion is the whole purpose of this. If you don't want to have a discussion then fine. Tell everyone to shut up and follow the corporate law, just like all of the 'big old companies' used to.

    Having a discussion doesn't mean tossing people up as a sacrifice to the deity of Freeze Peach. Bigots playing the "just asking questions" card is such and old, bad chestnut that it has a name - JAQing off. And if excluding the bigoted arguments means that the argument vanishes, then there never was one in the first place.

    So what if someone wants to make the argument that...

    "Women in Engineering gets too many resources compared to the group which helps me, Veterans in Engineering. We should get the same access to the main conference room and be allowed to send reps to recruit more Veterans even though there are 4 times as many women"

    I just don't see how you can have a discussion when discussion is banned. How do you decide what is banned? Are you going to write some titanic corporate handbook saying what people can and can't say?

    The world doesn't break neatly into liberals on one side with perfect truth and agreement and bigots on the other with nothing to add to any discussion ever.

    I'd point out that almost every tech firm has reps at veterans hiring events, of which there are many, often put together by the VA or using VA Veterans employment grants, also that there's actually a tax incentive for hiring unemployed vets and disabled vets, and that veterans have access to worker placement programs and additional vocational rehabilitation programs.

    Anyone who makes the discussion into "Women get too much support because they have access to [X], but Vets don't have access to [X}" is ignoring that veterans also have access to [y], [z], and the special 27th letter [þ]. Also that many vets are women.

    Vets have many and varied issues with getting into the workforce, but no one should use them as a cudgel against another group getting representation.

  • NotarussianbotNotarussianbot Registered User regular
    MrMister wrote: »
    That all seems okay to me, but what I have trouble with is the current thread of discussion--where criticism of the company's diversity policies is itself ipso facto bigotry, and, correspondingly, also to the NLRB letter's reference to Damore's "polite" and "cloaked" bigotry. Here's the thing about polite and cloaked bigotry: there's no clear intellectual standard for it, so far as I can tell. As an example, take the Supreme and Appellate Court decisions on affirmative action, and on whether AA is either a necessary corrective for or just another instance of discrimination. These decisions have been narrow, and the rationale has been, imo, pretty stupid. The celebrated Bakke v California and consequent Grutter v Bollinger--5 to 4, and you're allowed to count being a minority favorably but not institute explicit point systems? "You're allowed to count it favorably, but not give it points" is pretty close to incoherent, imo, and it's been, then and now, a compromise rationale resting on a razor's edge.

    Said compromise purely exists not because there's really any confusion about the value of programs like affirmative action.

    I 100% disagree with that statement and think that affirmative action is highly counterproductive.

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    Ideals are impossibilities.

    Let me clarify - you - whether a person or a corporate entity - cannot be apolitical, because it is impossible to be so.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    Ideals are impossibilities.

    Let me clarify - you - whether a person or a corporate entity - cannot be apolitical, because it is impossible to be so.

    You can get close

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
  • GoumindongGoumindong Registered User regular
    I would be shocked if there was information to suggest that. While loads of people like to claim that rebound and behavior effects totally make the status quo better than if oh say “we wore seatbelts” or “football players didn’t use pads” or “if we didn’t give poor people money”

    And basically every time the rebound effect is minimal and only useful in a theoretical discussion about where a floating opposite signed derivative goes when doing comparative statics.

    Do we have data or are we doing comparative statics?

    wbBv3fj.png
  • NyysjanNyysjan FinlandRegistered User regular
    MrMister wrote: »
    That all seems okay to me, but what I have trouble with is the current thread of discussion--where criticism of the company's diversity policies is itself ipso facto bigotry, and, correspondingly, also to the NLRB letter's reference to Damore's "polite" and "cloaked" bigotry. Here's the thing about polite and cloaked bigotry: there's no clear intellectual standard for it, so far as I can tell. As an example, take the Supreme and Appellate Court decisions on affirmative action, and on whether AA is either a necessary corrective for or just another instance of discrimination. These decisions have been narrow, and the rationale has been, imo, pretty stupid. The celebrated Bakke v California and consequent Grutter v Bollinger--5 to 4, and you're allowed to count being a minority favorably but not institute explicit point systems? "You're allowed to count it favorably, but not give it points" is pretty close to incoherent, imo, and it's been, then and now, a compromise rationale resting on a razor's edge.

    Said compromise purely exists not because there's really any confusion about the value of programs like affirmative action.

    I 100% disagree with that statement and think that affirmative action is highly counterproductive.
    How?
    The goal is to create diversity, affirmative action creates diversity.
    How is this counterproductive?
    And how would you go about creating diversity instead of affirmative action?

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    Ideals are impossibilities.

    Let me clarify - you - whether a person or a corporate entity - cannot be apolitical, because it is impossible to be so.

    You can get close

    No, you can't. At the most, you can choose to opt out of making any political considerations. But all that winds up being is a vote for the status quo.

    XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    Paladin wrote: »
    If companies can get away with being apolitical, they should. But there's money to be had in politics so they can't

    There is no such thing as "apolitical".

    There is no such thing as any ideal, but that doesn't stop them from being a point of reference

    It's not an ideal, it's an impossibility. Politics is a part of everything, so you can no more choose to be apolitical than you can choose to not breathe, and the same holds true for companies as well.

    Ideals are impossibilities.

    Let me clarify - you - whether a person or a corporate entity - cannot be apolitical, because it is impossible to be so.

    You can get close

    No, you can't. At the most, you can choose to opt out of making any political considerations. But all that winds up being is a vote for the status quo.

    If opting out was a vote for the status quo it wouldn't change so much.

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
  • NotarussianbotNotarussianbot Registered User regular
    Nyysjan wrote: »
    MrMister wrote: »
    That all seems okay to me, but what I have trouble with is the current thread of discussion--where criticism of the company's diversity policies is itself ipso facto bigotry, and, correspondingly, also to the NLRB letter's reference to Damore's "polite" and "cloaked" bigotry. Here's the thing about polite and cloaked bigotry: there's no clear intellectual standard for it, so far as I can tell. As an example, take the Supreme and Appellate Court decisions on affirmative action, and on whether AA is either a necessary corrective for or just another instance of discrimination. These decisions have been narrow, and the rationale has been, imo, pretty stupid. The celebrated Bakke v California and consequent Grutter v Bollinger--5 to 4, and you're allowed to count being a minority favorably but not institute explicit point systems? "You're allowed to count it favorably, but not give it points" is pretty close to incoherent, imo, and it's been, then and now, a compromise rationale resting on a razor's edge.

    Said compromise purely exists not because there's really any confusion about the value of programs like affirmative action.

    I 100% disagree with that statement and think that affirmative action is highly counterproductive.
    How?
    The goal is to create diversity, affirmative action creates diversity.
    How is this counterproductive?
    And how would you go about creating diversity instead of affirmative action?

    There is a fair amount of evidence that affirmative action does more to entrench resentment than to foster diversity. Racial quotas tend to backfire with further racism against other groups and the beneficiaries of such quotas have to operate under a stigma of "not having worked as hard." I also think taking the view that minority groups need our help to get along, all the while being equally smart and capable requires engaging in doublethink.
    Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to atone for past injustices and ameliorate their legacy. No one can deny that, for example, blacks in America or dalits in India (members of the caste once branded “untouchable”) have suffered grievous wrongs, and continue to suffer discrimination. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society fairer.
    ...
    Awarding university places to black students with lower test scores than whites sounds reasonable, given the legacy of segregation. But a study found that at some American universities, black applicants who scored 450 points (out of 1,600) worse than Asians on entrance tests were equally likely to win a place. That is neither fair on Asians, nor an incentive to blacks to study in high school. In their book “Mismatch”, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor produce evidence that suggests affirmative action reduces the number of blacks who qualify as lawyers by placing black students in law schools for which they are ill-prepared, causing many to drop out. Had they attended less demanding schools, they might have graduated.
    ...
    Although the groups covered by affirmative action tend to be poorer than their neighbours, the individuals who benefit are often not. One American federal-contracting programme favours businesses owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged” people. Such people can be 87 times richer than the average American family and still be deemed “disadvantaged” if their skin is the right colour.

    https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21576662-governments-should-be-colour-blind-time-scrap-affirmative-action

  • So It GoesSo It Goes We keep moving...Registered User regular
    edited February 2018
    This thread is pretty off the rails from the original topic.

    Goddamn you auto-correct.

    So It Goes on
  • So It GoesSo It Goes We keep moving...Registered User regular
    Geth, close the thread

  • GethGeth Legion Perseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
    Affirmative So It Goes. Closing thread...

This discussion has been closed.