Silicon Valley's liberal bubble has burst, and the culture war has arrived "I spent three months living in San Francisco in 2014 for a work assignment. As a New Yorker, I had the feeling I was jumping into a living cartoon, a culture more like HBO's "Silicon Valley" than anything steeped in reality. I was right. My main takeaway after my stint out west: The citizens of Silicon Valley are not like the rest of us. They're totally happy living in a bubble believing they're changing the world with their genius while ignoring the realities on the outside." Much more below. They live in an oddly Disneyesque manufactured world which has nothing to do with reality and acts like a mass movement. The point of a mass movement is it allows the adherents to surround themselves with other true believers who laud them for their slavish adherence to dogma. This adhernece protects the true believer from the horrible understanding that they are nothing more than imperfect humans prone to error and venality. The fake world of Silicone Valley performs a similar function, allowing those within to believe they are doing "God's Work" changing the world when, in fact, they are not. Most of the true believers in Silicone Valley are at the top while the engineers/coders are different. The mass movementization of Silicone Valley has happened for the same reason it occured to the Democratic Party and progressive leftism. The Democratic Party was a real political movement up until about 1972, when it completed its goals, it now has no purpose. The people in control of a political movement will never allow it to die without a serious fight; they have significant political power and rue the potential loss of that power. As such the Democratic Party has adopted the socialist canard of identity politics as a replacement for its previous politicsl goals. The identity politics canard has infiltrated the Silicone Valley world as part of the new dogma of the Democratic Party/leftist progressivism. "But that bubble burst this week when Google engineer James Damore's memo on diversity went viral and made him a hero of the far right almost overnight." Far right? The memo is little more than an accurate summary of the mainstream literature and research on the gender subject. The only groups opposing Damore's memo are those on the fringe progressive left who embrace identity politics. The fight here is no with the far right alone but with the vast middle: the libertarians, the classical liberals, the conservatives, the establishment Republicans, the centrist/Blue Dog Democrats, and with the far right. Read the memo here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf "The multi-layered bait was too sweet for the online #MAGA hordes not to bite. Here was a white male claiming disenfranchisement in an organization that he viewed as obsessed with political correctness and liberalism. He'd written a manifesto with claims about the biological inferiority of women for some tech jobs that were sure to hit home with the right. And the title of his essay alone — "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" — was sure to stir up passions." None of this paragraph is correct, it is a lie about what Damore wrote, and purpose of the memo. But then, Kovach must lie, he has no valid argument. Damore was not claiming disenfranchisement. He was pointing out the fact that the Goolag policy did not comport with the clinical research and that there may be real reasons for the gender disparity at Goolag, and in tech more generally. While the title of the memo may have been written to garner attention, the contents was a concise, dispassonate analysis of the status of the current research on the gender. Kovach's attempt to paint the memo as something else is yet more of the hysterical leftist progressive effluent pumped out by the mass movement to tar the memo and its author with lies. "YouTube, which is ironically owned by Google and has become a hot spot for right-wing vloggers, was the outlet of choice for Damore himself. His first public interviews were to Stefan Molyneux and Jordan B. Peterson, far-right figures who have built up large followings on the video site. (It's worth noting that Damore, who railed against ideological echo chambers in his memo, jumped right into one that matched his own views after he gained notoriety.)" Peterson is not a far right figure; he is a mainstream psychology professor whose teaching follow mainstream psychological research, not some fringe. Again Kovach must lie about this or have no argument at all. "Damore's memo and subsequent firing was the exploding powder keg that brought Silicon Valley into the culture war the rest of the country has been fighting for years. I have a feeling things are only going to accelerate from here. I've had Googlers this week describe to me a kind of hysteria within the company. There's talk about conservative employees organizing and rebelling by following the practice of "malicious compliance," where workers bent on sabotaging their superiors follow the letter of the orders they're given but not their intent. One employee told me that some of her coworkers who support Damore are outing Googlers who oppose his stance by sharing their internal Google+ profiles. That's caused some of those who have been outed to fear for their safety. CEO Sundar Pichai canceled a town hall meeting where he was scheduled to take questions about the Damore memo because of just those fears. But the bursting of the bubble is affecting more of Silicon Valley than just Google. Others in the tech industry are using the Damore memo as an excuse to speak out and express similar views, something you probably wouldn't have seen even six months ago." This analysis is mistaken; Silicone Valley was first brought into this conflict back with Gamergate when a group of identity politics leftist progressives tried to take down the gaming industry and bend it to their malignant anti-scientific demands. They lost in a rout, with the gaming community quickly turning on them and ripping them to shreds. It was a sight to behold. Those in power in Silicone Valley failed to understand the lesson of the Gamergate battle. They mostly ignored it thinking they and their engineers/coders were better people than the Gamers. But the reality is they are often the same group. Goolag's Sundar Pichai is in a precarious situation. Like the empires in Europe just before WWI who failed to understand the lessons of the American Civil War, Pichai has failed to understand the lessons of Gamergate, and will likely pay a severe price for his foolishness. Empire Goolag may face the same fate as the empires of Europe after WWI, total destruction. Demore's memo was well written, dispassionate, well researched, well analyzed, and not subject to significant debate. It is almost as if Damore set a trap to implode Goolag by its own anti-scientific gender beliefs. Whatever his underlying motives, his memo caused an acute fracture between the mass movement true believers in Silicone Valley, and the actual working engineers/coders who are mostly not adherents in the cult of identity politics. The only thing which remains unclear is whether Goolag's enemies in Silicone Valley like Apple will capitalize on Goolag's attempted suicide.; this would require the powers that be in those companies recognize the ability to gut Goolag's engineering/coding group and replace any weaker engineers/coders in their employ with higher quality individuals from Goolag. "The Google employees who were outed for opposing Damore have seen their names published on fringe-right sites. Meanwhile, more mainstream national figures on the right have weighed in. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who seems to have misread and misunderstood the memo, said Pichai should resign as CEO for firing Damore. Former Arkansas governor and conservative Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee called Damore's firing a "PC witch hunt.'" Of course, Brooks got the memo wrong, just as Kovach got the memo wrong in this article, but Brooks is a dork, while Kovach is more likely intentionally obfuscating the issue to keep his desired political outcome in play making Kovach a leftist progressive shill. Jordan Peterson speaks with James Damore: Stefan Molyneux speaks with James Damore: Ben Shapiro addresses the issues here, and here:
Comments
|
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|