NOTE TO READERS: I WILL CONTINUE TO UPDATE THE RELATED-READING LIST AS NEW, RELEVANT PIECES COME TO MY ATTENTION. MOST RECENTLY UPDATED ON 09/05/17 AT 1315 CT.
Google is a private company. I strongly support the right of private employers to fire anyone at any time for any reason. I am not here to condemn Google for having fired James Damore, the author of the now-notorious 10-page memo about Google’s ideological echo chamber.
The point of the memo, for those few of you who haven’t been paying attention, was the bias inherent in Google’s diversity policies, which ignore some basic (and well-known) facts about differences in men’s and women’s brains, bodies, and interests. Google fired Damore for “perpetuating stereotypes”, when it is Google which perpetuates anti-factual stereotypes.
I am writing about Google’s firing of Damore for daring to speak the truth because it is of a piece with the left’s political modus operandi:
- Fixate on an objective, regardless of its lack of feasibility (e.g. proportional representation of various demographic groups — but not Asians or Jews — in STEM fields), lack of validity (e.g., the demonstrated inaccuracy of climate models that lean heavily on the effects of atmospheric CO2); or consequences (e.g., high failure rates among under-qualified “minorities”, lower standards that affect the quality of output and even endanger lives, the futile use of expensive “renewable” energy sources in place of carbon-based fuels).
- Insist that attainment of the objective will advance liberty, equality, fraternity, or prosperity.
- Demand punishment for those who question the objective, thereby suppressing liberty; fostering false equality; engendering resentments that undermine fraternity; and diminishing prosperity.
What happened to James Damore is what happens where leftists control the machinery of the state. (Be mindful that Hitler was a leftist, as I explain and document in “Leftism“.) I turn to Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, with the proviso that his references to communism and socialism apply equally to leftism generally, whether it is called progressivism, liberalism, or liberal democracy:
[T]he abominations of actual socialism are characterized as deviations, or treasonous perversions of “true” Communism….
But this account of redemption through good intentions is undermined by an impartial and, above all, comprehensive exploration of socialist literature. Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for the success and preservation of the revolution….
What all totalitarian regimes have in common is that they are “ideocracies”: dictatorships of ideas…. [T]he rulers, convinced that they possess the absolute truth and are guiding the course of history for all humanity, believe they have the right to destroy dissidents (real or potential), races, classes, professional or cultural categories — anyone and everyone they see as obstacles, or capable one day of being obstacles, to the supreme design….
… [Ideocracy] strives to suppress — and it must in order to survive — all thinking that is opposed to or outside the official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, and even science.[pp. 94-100, passim]
The left’s supreme design includes the suppression of straight, white males; the elevation of females, blacks, Hispanics, other persons of color (but not Asians), and gender-confused persons, regardless of their inherent or actual abilities; the suppression of statements by anyone who questions the foregoing orthodoxies; the extinction of property and associative rights; and dirigisme on a scale that would be the envy of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — despite its demonstrably destructive effects.
Reading related to l’affaire Google (listed chronologically in short form; *** marks posts by James Thompson, which are especially authoritative):
Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes, 1 August (a prescient piece by Scott Alexander)
Dissent at Google, 5 August (another release of Damore’s memo)
Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences, 7 August
Google Fires Gender Dissenter, 7 August
The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond, 7 August
Google Is Being Evil After All, 8 August
Google’s Apparent Violation of Cal. Lab. Code § 1101 et seq., 8 August
Internet Gatekeepers’ Misconduct, 8 August
No, the Google Manifesto Isn’t Sexist or Anti-Diversity. It’s Science, 8 August
Rebels of Google: “Constant Abuse, Sneers, Insults And Smears … Sometimes You Get Punched”, 8 August
Setting the Facts Straight about the Science of Sex Differences, 8 August
The Factual Feminist on Gender Differences in Math and Science, 9 August
Google Culture Wars, 17 August***
The Google Gulag: The Internet Cannot Remain in the Hands of a Corporation That Hates Free Speech, 9 August
Google Memo Author James Damore: “The Whole Culture Tries to Silence Any Dissenting View”, 9 August
Google Memo Drama Really Is about Free Speech, 9 August
Google Women Help Prove Damore’s Point, 9 August
Some Scientists Respond to the Controversial Google Memo, 9 August
Why Identity Liberals Can’t Fish, 9 August
The Google Memo: Race and Gender Gaps and Their Solutions, 10 August
The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences?, 10 August
Google Sex, 10 August***
Survey: Most Google Employees Disagreed with Decision to Fire Memo Writer, 10 August (but the whole story is less than encouraging)
Video: I Won’t Be Around Much Longer, 10 August
Ads Trashing Google for Firing Engineer Appear All Over Venice, 11 August
By Firing the Google Memo Author, the Company Confirms His Thesis, 11 August
Fired for Expressing Diverse Ideas by Non-Diverse Diversity Apparatchik, 11 August
Google and Debate, 11 August
Google Betrays the Reason for Its Own Existence, 11 August
Google Diversity, 11 August***
Ideas (Like Bad Ones Kids Learn in College) Have Consequences, 11 August
No One Expects the Google Inquisition, But It’s Coming, 11 August
The Psychology of the New McCarthyism, 11 August
Silicon Valley Blues, 11 August
Sundar Pichai Should Resign As Google’s C.E.O., 11 August (even David Brooks is able to see the problem, though hazily)
What’s Good for Tech Is Not Good for America, 11 August
Damore: No One Expects the Google Inquisition, But…, 12 August
Google Teaming with Left-Wing Groups to Drive Conservatives Off the Internet, 20 August
Gender Bias in STEM — An Example of Biased Research?, 29 August
The Google Memo: The Economist on Nothing, 31 August
The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis – An Addendum to our post on the Google Memo, 4 September
The Lonely Lives of Silicon Valley Conservatives, 6 September
A short list of posts at P&P related to the rise of leftism in America:
The Near-Victory of Communism
Tocqueville’s Prescience
Liberty and Society
Tolerance on the Left
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
The Barbarians Within and the State of the Union
The Social Animal and the “Social Contract”
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
The Left and “the People”
Race and Social Engineering
FDR and Fascism: More Data
Red-Diaper Babies and Enemies Within
If Men Were Angels
Suicidal Despair and the “War on Whites”
Death of a Nation
The Invention of Rights
The Danger of Marginal Thinking
Liberty in Chains
Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Political Correctness
Politics and Prosperity 