Criticism of the political left

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/russia-trump-left/534534/

A warning to the left/Dems to not fall in the Rep trap of opposition only without concrete policy.

 

The danger of the white American liberal

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/danger-white-american-liberal-170817080000726.html

In his letters from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr shamed the white moderate, those of a liberal mind who sided with the oppressed in concept, but who did little to help - or even obstructed - their progress. This is similar to how I see much of liberal America, and certainly much of the technology industry. Diversity is a nice idea in concept, but it can wait for "a more convenient season" - that season likely being after a company's exit strategy or possibly as a settlement of its [he's referencing Google specifically] sexual harassment lawsuit.

I agree with King's frustration at the white moderate. At least the manifesto author - and by proxy, the conservative establishment - is honest about the lack of concern for achieving real equity in underrepresented groups. Like King, I would rather deal with his absolute misunderstanding than with the shallow understanding of much of liberal America. The former is at least an unfair fight I might labour to make fair.

When Dylann Roof killed nine innocent people at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, liberal white America was quick to condemn him as an evil individual, not indicative of any broader social construct. As if the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse meant nothing. As if the mass incarceration of black men for generations has meant nothing. As if generations of redlining home ownership in liberal white communities has meant nothing. Liberals asked why he did it, never asking "Why have I allowed this?"​

The manifesto has come up in circles I engage in, and there is a lot that is pointed out about how sexist it is. I always refer back that it sat on one or more desks and was probably known by several in upper management for at least a month prior to the guy being fired. There could be several reasons why, but one of the reasons is that they wanted to delete it from their database.

 

Do you have a source for the bolded? I worked at Google, and that's generally not how communication worked there. Something like that would be written and shared within a team, and then forwarded to people on other teams, and then could have gone public. I would be surprised if it took more than a week from the time he first shared the document with other employees, until it hit the public (on August 5). At Google, you don't submit things like that to your manager for review, and things don't sit on desks - they get shared internally and discussed online, and it happens pretty fast - faster than at other companies I worked at.

 

First, not even knowing how that structure works, I would have expected several people to have seen it, but your comment indicates that it likely would have been seen b upper management very quickly. Second, I was being figurative when I said it was sitting on a desk. It was an indication of lack of action being taken. As for the month comment, I can't find the article I encountered that said it, but seeing how the memo is dated "July, 2017" I can see how a journalist could assume a month passed rather than just a week or so. Not gonna look to hard to find that source, though.

 

I also saw an article that said the memo was dated "July 2017" - but that could also be July 31, or less than a week before it went public.

There could also be a difference of a few weeks between the time he wrote it, and the time he shared it. Nothing is going to happen until he shares it.

This article from Wired has some screen shots of the internal discussion groups which is a lot closer to how I remember communication happening there. (I stopped working there about three and a half years ago.) I never had a lot of time for that stuff, since I had a job to do, and then a family to take care of when I stopped working, but for those young single types who take the wifi-enabled bus from San Francisco and have an extra hour on their commute to browse internal discussion boards, they can engage in some pretty robust discussions. All the screen shots in that article show dates of August 4 so the thing was pretty clearly blowing up internally by then.

When I worked there, we didn't get the impression that management was looking over our shoulders. All the managers I knew were so busy trying to run their teams and meet objectives that seemed impossible to me, they had even less time for the internal discussion boards than I did. The culture was not like "oh, you'd better watch what you say because big brother is watching" - the culture was more like "as long as you get your work done, you can do what you want on your time, and by the way here's free food and free laundry and a bunch of other awesome perks to keep you at the office for longer than you otherwise would stay".

So my guess is that it didn't sit for long. My guess, based on my experience working there, is that this thing got shared, discussion grew internally over about a week while management pretended to ignore it, but when it went public they had to take action. I think a month is way longer than something like that would sit and only be discussed internally.

 

Fair enough.

I gotta ask, though: are you defending Google, the company, or Google's process? I hope it is the latter because the impression I have is that there is not a whole lot of diversity in the company (on the technical/development/analytical side). Is that your experience?

 

I think Google's process is fine. I think they were absolutely right to fire that guy - if he's going to take the time to write a ten page document about how women are inferior at tech and have the lack of common sense to share it with people, then every woman at the company who interacts with him is going to have to prove themselves to him before he will accept them as a worthy colleague. Women in tech have enough hurdles as it is.

I think that if that document had not gone public, he still would have been fired - enough employees would have pointed out to their managers that they don't want to work with a sexist jackass, and Google would have chosen to discipline him so that a bunch of other employees didn't quit. Even if the discipline wasn't a direct "you're fired" but rather a "here, have some more diversity training", the guy has enough of a victim complex (based on those screen shots in the Wired article) that he wouldn't have accepted it. Once that document got shared, that guy was not going to be working at Google much longer.

Regarding my experience with diversity at Google - I worked in a technical support group, which tends to be more heavily female than the engineering groups. I had multiple women managers, and a woman director during my time there. The group itself was still less than 50% women - I've worked at other places, also tech support groups, where women were the majority of employees. There are various reasons for why a tech support group is more likely to have women - some dudes don't think tech support is a "real" tech job, or "women's work", or things like that. I can't speak much for the engineering groups - most of the engineers I came into contact with were dudes but it was a pretty small sample size.

I think there are bigger problems with race. In twenty years of working in Silicon Valley, the number of black people I've worked with can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Latinos on the fingers of the other hand. I don't necessarily have any answers, but identifying a problem is the first step in trying to do something about it.

 

I saw the reports, and at first my reaction was that they are rejecting half a loaf when the other side is offering nothing...but then I caught myself and realized these people aren't being, say, purity trolls on something like single-payer-or-nothing, they're arguing for solidarity with all immigrants. I can't fault them for that.

There's a time to be tactical and pragmatic, and there's a time to draw a hard line.

 

See above. At first I agreed with you (I think the Left has a real tendency to do that all the time) but upon reflection, I don't see immigrant rights as a partisan or ideological issue. This ain't progressive taxation-vs-flat tax. This is basic human rights.