This is not a complicated case. Some asshole used his companies resources to post a bunch of pseudo-scientific bullshit demeaning and insulting half the employees, and google fired him. That is it.
This is not a fucking free speech issue, this is not an example of poor aggrieved wingers being shat on by the man, etc. It’s actually the opposite. It was the people who normally run shit crapping over others, again. The same shit that happens daily to women all over the country, just this time some white penis paid the price. Normally they get promoted.
The way Republicans and wingnuts always successfully make everything into victimhood and successfully parlay it into political gains makes me want to fucking break shit. I fucking hate these people.
Kryptik
It’s DARVO all the way down, John.
Deny
Attack
Reverse
Victim &
Offender
NYCMT
He doubled down on the garbage on All Things Considered. I wanted to smash my stereo but it was an expensive stereo and smashing it would not do anything about Brooks’ stupidity and vanity.
Salter Wobchak
Seconded.
piratedan
same old game plan, poor white guys (including myself) equating being threatened because they cannot be an asshole 24/7 and wonder why people shun them
Villago Delenda Est
The day BoBo’s exsanguinated broken body is found in a Manhattan back alley will be a good day for the human race.
gene108
This to shall pass…
That belief keeps me going.
MisterForkbeard
Yep. I can’t imagine sending an email to my company-at-large (or even to my department subdivision) saying that women, or filipinos, or mexicans or asians or whatever are just biologically different and we need to stop diversity hiring them. I’d get fired immediately for it.
If I wasn’t fired, no one in my team would want to work with me. Two, very few people outside of my team would work with me. If I stayed, I’d make my team look bad too. It makes you a giant fucking toxic wound in your company, and using a work email to push political agendas of any stripe is going to be a big goddamned problem in any case. I’d get fired for that too.
Then there’s the fact that the guy appears to be wrong, too. Just, you know, the icing on the cake.
hovercraft
Villagers have taken to calling Twitler “whinny”, when your hero is the biggest victim/whiner in the world, of course you are also victims of everybody who disagrees with you, and has the temerity to criticize let alone hold you accountable.
Starfish
The number of white men crawling up in my twitter accusing me of being illiterate or wanting to teach me biology when I am telling them that the pop psychology is stupid is amazing. They are all saying the same things to the point where I could make a bot.
“Have you read the memo?”
“He said ‘on average.'”
“He said men and women are different, not that women are worse.”
“Can you read?”
“Have you listened to Jordan Peterson?”
I wonder how these dudes breathe on their own if they are as daft as they are pretending to be.
Elizabelle
I heard El Bobo on All Things Considered. I thought Mark Shields did a quite good job of knocking Brooks down a few pegs, after letting him go first on commentary.
Mnemosyne
As someone else here said earlier today, conservatives love “at will” employment until they’re the ones getting fired at will.
jl
I’ve decided to just tell people that Brooks is writing a humor and satire column now. Everyone will believe it. Except for die-hard Trumpsters, and who cares about them?
gene108
It is also “funny” that the people, who default to “those are the rules, if you followed them nothing bad would have happened”, and “if the kids these days were polite, nothing bad would have happened”, when a black, brown, long haired hippy, or woman get screwed over, are bending over backwards to defend this guy, who broke his employer’s rules and was rude.
Splitting Image
The difference between David Brooks and the average Trump voter is that Brooks is a lickspittle who sucks up to the lowliest Trump voter, while the Trump voters by and large confine themselves to sucking up to Trump.
It’s a matter of refinement.
Motivated Seller
Shorter Google-Bro: “Hey Google, if you are so tolerant, you should tolerate my intolerance!”
jl
@Splitting Image: And humbility and character. Brooks has character, as he’s explained to us repeatedly.
Another Scott
@Starfish: Don’t let them silence you. They’re wrong.
Point them to Zunger’s Medium piece if you don’t want to argue with them any more, but don’t let them silence you from saying what you think.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
I find myself thankful that I have not been following this. My understanding: Douchebag acts like a douchebag. Douchebag gets fired. Other douchebags freak out.
Do I have the gist?
Kryptik
@gene108:
It’s almost like insinuating a large amount of your co-workers are inept, genetically & emotionally inferior token hires protected by ‘political correctness’ doesn’t exactly foster cooperation or a stable work environment. Fancy that.
Can people not understand that he’s not being fired because he had bad ideas, it’s that he shared those bad ideas in possibly the most insulting and damaging way possible to the company environment. That’s called ‘being a bad employee’, for fuck’s sake.
Starfish
@MisterForkbeard: I think they have a bunch of different lists or groups or something like that, and this bright bulb worked up his theory in the skeptic community where dudes smell each other’s farts and read Slate Star Codex.
Yarrow
In a sane world David Brooks would be shunned.
DissidentFish
@Elizabelle: Not Shields, EJ Dionne.
The memo itself reminds me a lot of the sociology and history papers I tortured my undergrad professors with. A sociology professor called me in to tell me that though the words and sentences were fine, the way I drew conclusions from my sources was not poor — it was fundamentally dishonest. He suggested either fixing that, or going into fiction or poetry…
randy khan
@Villago Delenda Est: He’s pretty bloodless already.
Starfish
@Another Scott: They were arguing that Zunger was being unprofessional because “a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face.” Clearly this line proves that the left is more violent than the right. I asked them to think critically about the last time they saw anyone get punched at work.
The PZ Myer piece was also quite good.
Peale
Fine. Switch to Bing. I’m sure Microsoft would love to be known as the mra’s protest search engine.
Omnes Omnibus
@Peale: Ha!
efgoldman
@Kryptik:
Right. If he’d kept his shitty ideas to himself, or only expressed them verbally, he might still be working there. He used internal company resources to spread his chickenshit. That’s a fireable offense anywhere.
Most of my last several managers, and their managers, at Enormous Brokerage & Mutual Funds LLC, were women. Like any other group, some were excellent, some should never have been promoted. But if I’d written a similar email memo using company resources, I would have expected to be fired, too.
cs
Glad to see this posted. So fucking tired of these people. What’s really funny is how these tough guys flip the fuck out over feminists who write much, much milder things. For example, how Anita Sarkeesian was treated for posting some very mild critiques. How all these people, wringing their hands about “free speech” and praising Google’s asshole for bravery, happily worked hard to silence her and denigrated her courage in not breaking.
efgoldman
@Yarrow:
In a sane world, he’d have to get a real job and work for a living.
azlib
Private corporations are not a democracy and their are no free speech rights. Google did what it did because this guy disrupted Google’s workplace environment. Google well understands breaking down sexist barriers in the workplace helps their bottom line by letting them hire the best talent regardless of their gender. David Brooks is an idiot if he does not understand this simple fact.
I am an IT professional and I have sure seen environments which are not welcoming to women. Frankly, we need more women in IT. If anything it will help decrease the sexist bullshit I have seen in my career. I applaud Google for moving in this direction even if their motives are entirely selfish.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: pretty much. And now the RW are defending his freedom from the consequences of free speech.
Major Major Major Major
I liked it better last weekend when I was one of the few here being inundated by this shit, at least I could come here and not be.
mai naem mobile
I’m sure the cherry on top for Bobo was calling on a brown furriner to resign from a top corporate job.
Frankensteinbeck
@piratedan:
This is the Trump voter, right here. It’s what everyone who uses the phrase ‘political correctness’ means, or ‘says what others are afraid to say’ is talking about. It is Trump’s central, maybe only message. Any Trump supporter you know is jonesing for the right to be as big an asshole as they want, any time they want.
Peale
Was actually bitching and moaning today. I work for a large corporation that has the now standard white collar diversity and corporate citizenship philosophy that google has. And yet my manifesto goes nowhere because of name recognition. I’d just be fired and no one would put me on TV and treat me like I had something to say because no one would believe that we only hired super geniuses to fill all of our positions and therefore any two bit ramblings needed special consideration.
fuckwit
@Omnes Omnibus: yes
SWMBO
@efgoldman: I’m starting to favor the “hard manual labor” thing. Something where his soft little hands would bleed from scrapes and roughness. Something that his back would remind him for the rest of his life that hard work doesn’t necessarily build character as much as it breaks you down.
lamh36
Happening now…sigh
NotMax
The post-firing brouhaha is classic tempest in a teapot.
P.S.: Anyone working in the IT field ought to be familiar with what a EULA is. His acceptance of the job was for all intents and purposes equivalent to clicking “Accept” on a EULA.
Elizabelle
@DissidentFish: Thank you. Missed the top of the program. EJ Dionne it is.
And I love your ‘nym.
To this day, I miss Judas Escargot.
Peale
@Major Major Major Major: yep. I’m not certain how this became a media sensation. But then the media spent the day debating whether or not the East India company was the new way forward for our foreign policy because Erik Prince wanted to talk about it. I’m really hoping that Justin Bieber does something outrageous soon so that the powers in charge of Our national conversation can go back to being shallow.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax:
Something he didn’t really think about and that most people can pretty much ignore unless they’re specifically targeted for a violation?
jl
@efgoldman: Thanks for giving me an excuse to repeat my theory of the standard Brook’s column. Someone in the GOP propaganda machine tosses him a few ideas about what BS should be put out ‘out there’ for the day, with a cheat sheet on references and some links. Brooks chooses the easiest, ambles over to the computer when he gets around to it, and types until deadline and punches the send button. Just a theory, but I don’t know what else can explain such lazy vapid and tendentious nonsense.
Which brings to mind the hilarious tale of the low income friend he supposedly took to a fancy Eye-talian restaurant and the fancy Eeye-talian luncheon meat names so intimidated this supposed guest, that the humble man with character had mercy and, so the legend goes, took the waif to McDonalds. That has to be up there with Applebee salad bar. But so much funnier. That anecdote is so loopily implausible and self-satirical and features such clueless doofus narrator, it will become a fake Twain anecdote someday.
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh36:
Wrong. Pasty white people like me are going to be in the minority. It’s going to happen. White people can either accept it (with stupid fuck-ups along the way) or not.
Peale
@lamh36: torches? Really? How quaint. Maybe if they kept up to date on current developments in lighting technology, we wouldn’t feel that they could be replaced by younger, more adaptable minds.
lamh36
If I had a child going to UVA, I’d do my damndest to make sure they have someplace else to go by the next semester!
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Fareed Zakaria (Indian immigrant) is on Bill Maher saying Democrats need to get tough on Mexican immigrants.
Bright guy.
first they came for the mexican immigrates, then they came…
ThresherK
@Starfish: I don’t have a Twitter for that same reason. The amount of JAQing off (I’m just asking questions!) from these guys sounds incalculable.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: I thought they went to get tacos, food to the proletariat.
But yeah, other than the part where his much younger wife throws in a couple of ‘llenial references (that’s Millennial for ‘Millennial’*), that seems about right.
*about as factual as anything else about my generation you’ll find in a Brooks column
jl
@lamh36: The university is not in session. Need to wait to see whether this is just a bunch of moronic hate mongers who decided to march to campus and make a hateful statement and get in the news.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: that’s my understanding. I have pretty much only followed it here, and to one or two links posted here.
ETA: Evil Willow Voice says “Bored now” to white male supremacist butt-hurt.
lamh36
Response from Charlotteville mayor:
https://twitter.com/KCauley24/status/896199924009906177
jl
@jl: Thanks for reminding me it was a taco joint. When i read that column, I immediately thought it was a fraud, and started laughing that a grown man with character would write such dreck. But Brooks does have humbility. He taught a course on it in college, I hear.
Starfish
@ThresherK: I started yelling at some of the dirtbags that I do not usually yell at. Male brogrammers in their 50s who are clearly super self sufficient and have the answers to everything and can carefully consider and not weigh in on issues that do not matter to them personally other than as some impersonal philosophical game.
Peale
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: fine. Put us back in charge of something and we’ll show you just how tough we can be.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
So, just to be clear — these guys were too chickenshit to pull this stunt while school was in session, so they showed up to defiantly march around an empty campus?
Fucking Broflakes, I swear.
lamh36
@jl: don’t care, if I had a child who was going to go their, I’d be very nervous about the ease with which these folks are willing to come out and NOT with white sheets covering their faces…
Starfish
@lamh36: They needed to write down license plate numbers after the first time this happened. They should have arrested some of them. Remember when the BLM protestors were arrested for being in the street? They could have denied their parade licenses.
NotMax
@Strafish
Someone being in his/her 50s does not preclude also being sophomoric.
@jl
If someone brags “I got an A in Being Humble 101” does that require altering the grade?
;)
Mike J
@Kryptik:
Keep in mind that in the Taylor Swift trial, the DJ that grabbed her ass sued her for defamation. She only counter sued for $1 to force him to trial.
jl
@Starfish: ” matter to them personally other than as some impersonal philosophical game. ”
People who lecture in that sort of way are about as disinterested and philosophical as your average avaricious miser who grinds every penny he can out of people who don’t have the means to fight back. Usually, they erupt when something threatens their sense of entitlement and status and a deep nerve is touched. They’ll almost never be honest about what is really grinder their gears.
lamh36
lamh36
lamh36
opiejeanne
@jl: It’s an organized rally/protest thingie for the Nazis, KKK, MRAs, III percenters, you name it.
Air BnB has been blocking them for about a week, deleting their accounts so they can’t rent a place for the event and the howls have been pretty funny.
There is a planned counter-protest.
jl
@Mnemosyne: That is my understanding from the video news clip I saw, and seems to be confirmed by the mayor’s statement.
@lamh36: OK. I’m a white guy who could pass with those people, so I can afford to be more casual about it. I can understand your viewpoint. Those people have always been around, but are feeling emboldened by the racist authoritarians in power. They will scurry back under their rocks when the Trumspters are dumped out of power, one way or another.
NotMax
@lamh36
Humor interlude.
Godfrey Cambridge on the Klan.
Sentient AI from the Future
It’s gamergaters all the way down.
randy khan
@Mike J:
And his case against her was dismissed by the judge today, so it won’t even go to a jury. (Unfortunately, his case against her mother and one of her staff did not get dismissed, but it seems unlikely it will go anywhere.)
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
Police are right to keep the church members inside. You don’t want some a-hole with a gun taking potshots. Better for them to shelter in place and have the police block anyone who tries to get in.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
I wrote along those lines, that conservatives like At Will state laws because they never think that it will apply to them.
Fucking wankers. So smug, so self superior, so fucking wrong.
lamh36
They were expecting the protest…this is from 3hours ag
Spider-Dan
Remember: every complaint about “political correctness” can always be translated as “I don’t want to be criticized for my awful opinions, especially if that awful opinion is criticism of you.”
debbie
Milo’s oozed out of his cesspool to support that clown.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Why yes, yes you do.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: leopards, faces…
Librarian
@lamh36: I’m pretty sure that UVA has no connection with the demonstration. It’s a state university.
lamh36
Sorry Senator, but some of those folk are indeed likely from place in Va.
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
FWIW, most of these jerks are out of towners who are showing up to do their thing on an EMPTY campus because they’re too cowardly to do it when the students are there to counter-protest.
But, yes, if I were the parent of a student there, I would be demanding that the administration spell out exactly what their plan is to keep students safe now that the campus has become a target for white supremacist assholes.
lamh36
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax:
Hey!
lamh36
@Mnemosyne:
lamh36
@Librarian: again…don’t matter…it must be nice to be able to see something like this and feel assured that it’s just some idiots, when you and yours are not likely the target.
If I was a parent, I’d be very upset by this…and to tell folks for what it’s worth, it’s just outside agitators won’t make me feel any more assured
Amaranthine RBG
More like 1/3 of the employees.
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
Mark Warner is a Democrat. Is he not supposed to say that hate has no place in his state?
jl
@debbie: We have a BJ anthology night! A lot of goofball defense of Googledudebro. This one by philosopher Peter Singer, who I am not a big fan of. Josh Marshall is making fun of it on twitter, and I think deservedly so.
The argument Peter Singer makes here seems remarkably wooden and simplistic for such a respected thinker.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/896202828414418944
I have to wonder what nerves were touched here, or maybe earnest people like Singer just think they have something wise to say and then pound out drivel.
Google is private company, and apparently Googledudebro took it on himself to write a half-assed memo criticizing, and sloppily accusatory (towards his bosses) memo and broadcast it to a big chunk of Google’s work force. Google owes this guy no first amendment rights. And Google if a corporation. It has one duty: make money for shareholders. If Googledudebro did something so stupid it is more expensive to repair the situation than to fire him, too bad for dudebro, out he goes. I don’t see an interesting issue here. The firing might be the right or wrong decision from a corporate management viewpoint, so make it case for B-school.
Apparantly, from a news article, this dudebro was a supervisor at Google. That explains a lot about what may seem a harsh firing.
RedDirtGirl
I think this blog is my spirit animal.
lamh36
Villago Delenda Est
@lamh36: Oh, this is wonderful. As someone pointed out on twitter, that these asshats are doing this with little restraint is a testament to white privilege.
Major Major Major Major
@lamh36: yeah, my parents would have lost their shit and I’m a white guy.
efgoldman
@lamh36:
Those of us old enough to remember the demonstrations, bus rides, and sit-ins of the civil rights era, will also remember that “outside agitators” was a familiar trope of the Southern segregationists. What goes around…
Villago Delenda Est
@jl: As Omnes can attest, if you’re in a leadership position in the Army, and you don’t support the Army’s stated policy on Equal Opportunity and Race Relations, your career will end prematurely. Google had little choice but to can this guy for openly defying stated corporate HR policy.
Yarrow
Why did the white supremacists pick Charlottesville and UVA for their gathering? Did they state a reason?
Gretchen
His linked-in resume said he had a PhD from Harvard, while actually he was invited to leave after his master’s. If that’s the resume he gave Google when he was hired, that’s a firing offense by itself. My employer makes that clear from the outset, and my employer doesn’t have 100 people apply for every opening like Google.
Villago Delenda Est
@Spider-Dan: “I have the right to be an asshole and have my assholishness validated by everyone around me.”
Amaranthine RBG
@Villago Delenda Est:
Google’s corporate HR policy actually lines up pretty closely with that of the fired guy – on the tech side 4 out of 5 employees are male..
leeleeFL
@Yarrow: In a sane world, he’d be an unemployed DudeBro. I too am done with the whiny BS. I’d live to see them live my life and f’in survive
WaterGirl
This Google story is reminding me of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard: Why women are poor at science.
Things didn’t go too well for him, either, as I recall.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est: Glad you could make out my meaning with all the typos in my comment.
The guy did something really dumb at work, and he got his ass fired by his bosses. The US military in a government organization, and has to ensure a similar person who did a similarly dumb thing far more due process than a corporation.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: he was a senior engineer but that just means he wasn’t a junior engineer… where are you seeing management?
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: I what now? Seriously though, the army put up the most resistance to Truman’s integration order (horsey Southerners) before it happened, it did better than the other services at actual integration.
jl
@Gretchen: Thanks, I thought I read that someplace, but wasn’t sure if I remembered it rightly. You can almost expect that kind of BS from people who pull these kinds of stunts. He is entitled to his beliefs, and he should sure have the right to put them up for discussion, but Not at work, and not in the way he distributed it, and not in a way that prejudiced his ability to perform his duties at work.
An abortion advocate who worked at Hobby Lobby and who started sending out blast emails full of opinions on that topic would be in much the same position.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: I heard in a news story that he supervised the work of other Google employees. Part of his job was being a supervisor.. That’s all I know about it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amaranthine RBG: My god, you are predictable. Guns and/or anti-diversity every time. Rather sad.
Starfish
@Gretchen: He did a summer internship for Google, and then he decided to stay at Google instead of finishing up his degree. A lot of grad students in the US put the dollars before the degrees. That is why the US has so many foreign students in a lot of the Ph.D. programs in the hard sciences.
Starfish
@jl: Engineers at Google are responsible for evaluating each other’s work when it comes to raises. Maybe that is what you saw?
Gretchen
@Mike J: My husband loved the detail that DJ’s lawyer asked, if DJ is grabbing your ass in that picture, why is the front of your dress smoothe? Swift: because my ass is on the back of my body.
Peale
@lamh36: yep. This makes sense now. There is an election in VA soon and Charlottesville is trying to get some confederate statues removed. So let’s make the election about honoring the confederacy. Mobilize GOP voters that way.
Tom
Isn’t this the same Bobo who sent his wife of a couple decades to Dumpsville so he could pork his 23 year old “research” assistant?
Omnes Omnibus
@Gretchen: Do you have a link? I really want to read the transcript of that and my Friday night google-fu may not be at its best.
Major Major Major Major
@Peale: fucking snowflakes are so obsessed with their civil war participation trophies.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Taylor Swift testimony
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom:
Gretchen
@Starfish: I saw one academic opine that this is how PhD programs get rid of students who are floundering – get them an internship, put a word in encouraging internship to hire loser, problem solved.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: By the time you and I were serving, that had turned around, in part because of the experience of Vietnam, and the Civil Rights era in general.
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: Thank you. Off to read.
Added: Good for her.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Applebee’s is headquartered here beautiful downtown Glendale.
ETA: As far as I know, we don’t have an Applebee’s in Glendale.
rikyrah
Truth Cole
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s some anger brewing that feminists are silent about this, that the hatred of her among some of the people in her industry is similar to the treatment of Hillary, that Taylor can do no right.
Peale
@Gretchen: or you don’t have a dissertation topic. But yeah, I went to work rather than complete a phd. The foreign students don’t have that option. They tend to be trapped by the F1 visa. Either finish up or go home and apply for a different visa.
Peale
@Major Major Major Major: wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Kind of like how you’d think protesting Mexican school children seeking asylum would have cost the GOP votes in 2016, but it appeared to cost them nothing.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
FTFY.
Major Major Major Major
@Peale: I wasn’t dismissing them as people whose votes are counted.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amaranthine RBG:
Whether it’s a 1/2 or a 1/3, what difference does it make?
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: Posh blonde is bad because posh blonde? Bad logic.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
That’s cruel. Some poor EMT or coroner is going to have to put that on a gurney and cart it to the morgue. There isn’t enough pay in the world for that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: ROFL
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I don’t think reality is a regular with this one.
Mike J
@Peale:
lamh36
Roger Moore
@Peale:
They wanted to keep some of the old traditions now that hoods and burning crosses are unacceptable.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike J: Snowflakes. The lot of them.
Mike G
If some techbro had written a manifesto about how Christians are unsuited for scientific work because they are conditioned to believe fairy tales, I’m sure the Rabies Right would be rushing to defend his free speech rights.
For bonus points, name one Republican-dominated institution where employees can publicly blast opinions at odds with management and insulting to half the workforce and not get fired.
Regine Touchon
They are truly mole people, if I may quote Charlie Pierce.
lamh36
lamh36
@lamh36:
lamh36
FYI, tomorrow there will be more and likely larger…
fuckwit
Off topic, but: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2-M7FCWgAMCP16.jpg
trollhattan
Our water is out due to a main break three doors down and I’m telling our little French houseguest she should feel at home since their infrastructure is probably always breaking too, oui? It’s very impressive to see half a foot of water running down the street in August, but the whole no-toilet thing will get old fast.
kindness
The victimhood within the right wing nutcases is strong. It’s an easy card to play. So easy, dumb asses can do it.
lamh36
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Major Major Major Major:
I liked it better in my alternate plane of existence, when I had not spent the last 56 years being inundated by this shit, and I could go anywhere and not be.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
It’s posts like this that lead me to marvel that the guy who runs this blog was once, as he himself put it, a full-metal wingnut. This blog gives me hope that there is indeed hope for this country.
Mike in NC
@lamh36: So will Trump be flying in on his helicopter to lend moral support to these scum?
Laura
@efgoldman:
RE: David Brooks, in a just world, Driftglass, mother fuckers.
Chet Murthy
Holy mackerel, this Damore ….. whaaat a fucknugget.
Lemme tellya a little story. *NO* political content involved.
So once upon a time, a -very- well-respected (I mean -very- well-respected) hardware (CPU) designer was at a big-ass conference, and from the back of the room, said “none of you jokers think Itanium [ed: some of you might know it as Intel’s “ia64″ or Merced] is going anywhere — so why do any of you even bother to pretend otherwise?” Within minutes, there was an -army- of flacks from his employer descending upon him, and he was silenced.
And this was something with neither HR nor political implications. Shit, this was just TRUTH. Itanium WAS bullshit. Even then, and even though he was one of the foremost chip designers alive, he couldn’t say it.
So … back to shitbird Damore. Y’know, I’m with Daniel Davies, that Damore is a cheap mimeograph of Larry Summers. Cheap. Knockoff. But the -idea- that he can *destroy* the workplace culture of his employer, without expecting to be *fired* …. SHIT REALLY?
And just to be clear, I’m not opining in any way, shape, or form, about the truth of his allegations. [Truth is] Not necessary to fuckin’ fire his sorry ass. Just as the truth of the allegation that Itanium was a boat-anchor, doesn’t matter.
The -embarrassment- of being male, at a time like this. The -embarrassment-.
Then again, there’s this: http://www.theonion.com/video/east-timors-first-female-dictator-hailed-as-step-f-14311
So maybe the phrase “at a time like this” doesn’t really apply.
patrick II
@Starfish:
Do you think Google is going to go back and review how he rated his fellow female engineers?
Roger Moore
@lamh36:
Let’s see how many of those actually show up. I’m guessing it will be at, and quite possibly below, the low end of those ranges.
Major Major Major Major
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: I meant this particular incident, but yes, point.
H.E.Wolf
@Amaranthine RBG:
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Interestingly, research has shown that when an under-represented minority group achieves 1/3 representation, the majority group perceives it as 1/2… or, sometimes, greater than half.
Anecdata: I’ve seen this play out in groups I’ve been in, when the majority-minority percentages are historically very unbalanced. It’s interesting to notice when that 1/3 mark is reached, and the reactions to it.
I believe this mis-perception may be referenced in Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, a book which I found to be a very good resource on stereotype threat and associated topics. (Obligatory disclaimer: no book, nor no author, is perfect.)
Chet Murthy
@patrick II: Reading up-thread, and clicking around the Internet, it isn’t clear what his rank was at Google. Does anybody know? The -title- matters a bit. Concretely, unless he was a “staff software engineer’ (level 6) or higher, frankly, he was on probation until he demonstrated his worth.
[just to be clear: I doubt anybody no matter how highly-ranked, could have survived this sort of own-goal, and with good reason. But I’m just saying that, if he was “<= 5", he was a -peon-.]
Chet Murthy
@Chet Murthy: I should add: “senior software engineer” (T5) is -lower- in rank than “staff software engineer” (T6). Yeah: misleading.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
They’d damn well better. I remember seeing something recently where Google was claiming that pay discrepancy at their company couldn’t possibly be because of bias because the people determining raises looked only at job title, experience, location, and performance reviews, and their gender wasn’t included in the data packet. They somehow overlooked the possibility that the performance reviews might be systematically biased.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@opiejeanne:
Uhhh…
Chet Murthy
@Roger Moore: Heh. in 1991 I remember Edith Cresson becoming Prime Minister of France. And I remember well her being excoriated in the (English) press as a hard-ass. Whereas, -men- are “tough negotiators”.
Systematic bias, indeed.
OTOH, hey, Donnie’s a pushover. We could replace him with Edith Cresson, and all benefit. ffs. ffs. kill me now, lord.
Ruckus
@Chet Murthy:
He seems to have achieved peon status no matter his level at the google.
Roger Moore
@Chet Murthy:
I find the way “senior” gets thrown around at software companies amusing. Where I work, it’s very unusual for somebody to be promoted to “senior” level without at least 10-15 years of experience and an excellent performance record. The way software people pass the title around to anyone who’s progressed to merely damp behind the ears just seems silly.
Chet Murthy
@Roger Moore: I guess, I wasn’t opining on his experience or lack thereof. More: his precise rank matters, b/c until you’re a T6, you don’t matter. It’s like “MTS” (Member of Technical Staff) at Bell Labs, back in the day. Until you get that rank, you’re nobody.
And of course: that the -janitor- expressed such opinions at a company is reason for alarm. But still, if he was “<=5", at some level we can take some comfort, that he wasn't …. respected. Yeah: small comfort.
seaboogie
Ya know – if it weren’t for the simple fact that most of the men that I know and love are Caucasian (history and current geographical experience), I would have to say that white men are made of glass – they are just that fragile*. So many spouting off about superiority whilst simultaneously claiming victim-hood should simply embarrass them. Today is a sad day for for white males, and I’m including the whatitsnamers who are pre-empively dismissing Kamala Harris.
*Beloved commenters notwithstanding…
Roger Moore
@seaboogie:
The fragility is a result of being coddled. The broflakes have played their whole lives on beginner level, so they have no idea of how to deal with adversity. Of course there are plenty of white dudes who are made of sterner stuff- I like to think I’m a bit tougher than glass- but a disproportionate share of the really fragile people are white dudes. And, of course, their whining is far more likely to be amplified by the media than when somebody else does it.
Dmbeaster
Sudar PichaiDavid Brooks Should Resign asGoogle’s C.E.O.N.Y. Times columnist.Fixed
seaboogie
@Roger Moore: Yep – check that.
TenguPhule
@Yarrow:
In a sane world Brooks would be lying in a gutter having died of poverty.
opiejeanne
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Yeah, that’s an excellent article but not what they were pointing at in the article I saw.
It was silence by a group of performers, celebrities, and all self-identified feminists who have criticized her in the past no matter what she did. It’s in the article that I posted a link to for Omnes, up above.
Aimai
@jl: really? “You can afford to feel more casual about it?” I’m white and I can’t. You need your fucking head examined.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@NYCMT: NPR is not dead to you yet? Get with the program.
Daddio7
@Omnes Omnibus: Man tells politically incorrect truth, suffers intolerance. Fixed that for you.
different-church-lady
David Brooks should resign as CEO of ass-hattery.
different-church-lady
@Daddio7:
Sure, fixed in the same sense that Zappa used in “Flakes”
JoeSo
@Villago Delenda Est: So we’re cheering for people’s murder now? We’re going deep into the gutter now?
Ransom
Best thing I read about this is on Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/11/from-a-logical-point-of-view/
Explains how GoogleBro totally doesn’t understand *recruiting process — what is it for?*