Why is this post flagged?
I think the policy of flagging without providing an explanation is becoming a problem on contentious issues. It allows a minority to have disproportionate influence on a discussion.
I think there are several conflicting ideas of flagging:
- Reason: I'm tired of this topic (I feel like this doesn't happen much, or else all this bitcoin talk would have stopped 3 years ago, as well as "Building X in language Y").
- Reason: I think this piece is non-factual and doesn't present any falsifiable claims.
- Reason: I think this piece is demonstrably inaccurate
- Reason: I think this is a controversial topic
I think controversy is an indication of the importance of a topic.
> In the aftermath of the so-called Google memo affair, there has been no shortage of misleading and in some cases downright inaccurate media coverage painting the author, James Damore, and his supporters in a very unfavorable light.
Personally I think the biggest problem is that people who criticize him keep going "he's wrong" "you can't say that" "saying women are less interested is sexist". It just lets others further their manufactured outrage and act like victims of oppression.
Vs he said things that strongly implied his female coworkers were less competent and he was fired because of the damage this did to the work environment.
> it is difficult to see how one could read his memo in its entirety and walk away with the conclusion that it was written by someone who seeks to keep women out of technology
uh huh. I'm getting really tired of being told I just didn't read it or understand it. I read it. I think Damore is a fucking idiot for writing it that way. I also think the basic idea "maybe less women are interested" is perfectly reasonable to talk about. I think bringing up how much more neurotic women are was incredibly fucking stupid. I think bring up the fact that he's a conservative was just him whining. I think the people who say "it's science" are missing the point. I think his memo was incredibly slanted and discussed no reasons beyond some tenuous biological links as reasons for women not to go into tech.
I also think a lot of the people who keep complaining about how they want a dialogue are being disingenuous, because when someone says something against the memo the response is that they obviously didn't read it.
> a political movement seeking to raise awareness of how gender inequality issues affect men and boys that has long been smeared in the media as misogynistic.
maybe cause it's pretty misogynistic. check their Reddit sometime (although it's not as bad as MGTOW).
> it is not a hate movement rooted in misogyny
but there does seem to be a lot of misogyny in it.
They have real complaints about some things, but I feel like it's pretty easy to why people are turned off by it.
Every repugnant conclusion has always come coated in a veneer of rationality. No racist, sexist, islamophobe or any other kind of bigot has ever called themselves by these appellations or expressed their opinions without being able to bring in piles of dubious evidence to back up their opinions.
Let's take the example of the Men's Rights Movement discussed in the article. While there are of course many factions within the MRM, the very existence of something that arose specifically to counteract the rise of feminism is a slap in the face to the struggles brought forth by women. With the same veneer of rationality, its purpose is to drown out women's concerns by raising the voices of men to a raucous cry.
This is not to say that men do not experience problems, but the MRM is almost exclusively a reaction to feminism. It's an age-old divisionary tactic, of pitting an oppressed group against an even more oppressed group. The English American colonists considered the genocided Native Americans to be one of their biggest oppressors, the war-torn Germans took to blaming the Jews who have already been persecuted for centuries. It's easier to find a weaker target than to look for the deeper causes of oppression.
The problem with Damore is not that his stats are wrong, but their veneer of rationality. Disagreeing with his repugnant conclusions (such as, eliminating Google's diversity programmes), is not because we hate scientific discourse, but because his veneer of rationality is just that: a veneer. The causes and explanations are far more complicated than what he cites or could cite in the space of 11 pages, and in the meantime it's far better to err in the side of caution and offer an advantage to the underrepresented group.
It's still hard for me to get over the fact that the very first people Damore had interview him were Stephen "cult leader" Molyneux and Jordan Petersen. He's also got interviews with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. It's totally possible that they were the only outlets that would give him a platform, but those are very biased and partisan outlets. If he was as objective and free thinking as he's depicted as, why was his first reaction to jump to one of the extremes?
This article is a great example about why there is a sexual harassment problem in technology. It's conflating two completely different things in the name of "free thinking": the facts about men and women and the severity of sexism. Are men and women different? Yes. Have those differences ever been shown to affect their ability to do the same job? No. Sexism exists because of the perceived answer to the second question, not the first.
The dismissal of Costolo's point about the urgency of addressing sexual harassment based on a false dichotomy summarizes the key flaw in the entire article. You cannot simultaneously have an intellectual debate about a topic when one of the parties involved is being actively demeaned and marginalized.