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by DashAnimal 2 hours ago
I always hate the James Damore discussion because it's like the least interesting part. You have a company dealing with internal political mayhem trying to find the least disruptive, not only internally but now externally because this shit has leaked. It's a workplace, and youre trying to keep people effective and working. And some googlers got too comfortable with what they were sharing on a work machine, not just to their coworkers, but tens of thousands of employees.

The support of war efforts is clearly a change in moral compass that is much more fascinating though.

1 comments

100% agree. The James Damore flag was immediately taken up by major figures in transphobia (like Singal, Soh, etc) and pro-fascism campaigners (like Molyneux), both of which are political programs are absolutely incompatible with maintaining a non-hostile workplace environment for employees. (and not incidentally, both of which a premised on discredited bioessentialist pseudoscience)

I find it is a deeply cynical move, to be asked to place the James Damore "was it employer overreach-or-not?" episode in similar proportion to critiquing a company's actions regarding issues such as mass surveillance and/or assisting war efforts, especially when the accusations about those broader issues are tied to complicity in the 2020s resurgence in fascist politics. It is so cynical that I can't believe it isn't intentional.

What is the "bioessentialist pseudoscience" you're referring to?
One of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics,

and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities.

The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Racial,_cultural_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism

What sorts of scientific racism (or gender essentialism) have Jesse Signal and Deborah Soh propagated? To be clear, I'm not asking for a primer on scientific racism, I'm asking you to substantiate the allegations you made against specific individuals.