[clavicat]

If Damore had instead offered his opinion that Google lacked diversity because of white-supremacist patriarchy, Donald Trump, and rapey tech bros, somehow I doubt that you would have conjured this list of excuses to pathologize him for voicing his opinion and provoking a mob to demand that he be deprived of his livelihood. No, you probably would have described the backlash as an atrocity being inflicted on a courageous voice for denouncing social injustice. This is a splendid example of a selective demand for rigor. In order to share an opinion, you apparently have to “do a substantive sociological investigation”—do you think the other parties in the same conversation were performing field studies and submitting their master’s thesis? You blame him for “not starting a discussion”—even though he had written what he did as a contribution to an ongoing discussion. You blame for having any certitude in his own opinion—I’m sure the mob baying for his head just really disliked fanaticism. Oh, he was supposed to recruit co-authors—this is an absurd demand that goes far beyond even what is expected of academic papers, which do have sole authors.

This is how ideologically dominant positions always shore up their hegemony. Every time an enemy of theirs fails to dot every I and cross every T, you can be sure that the regime will magnify their missteps all out of proportion and invent procedures that they failed to follow in order to justify whatever act of savage repression is visited on them.

>much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.

Again, remind me which “perspective” was calling for the other side to be rendered unemployable?