URLs du Jour

2017-08-07

no horn blowing

Proverbs 22:24-25 is pretty good advice on avoiding the short-fused:

24 Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person,
    do not associate with one easily angered,
25 or you may learn their ways
    and get yourself ensnared.

These days, Pun Salad is more likely to be Disgusted than Angered. Hopefully that passes Proverbial muster.

(Until recently, Pun Salad tried to follow the Elvis Costello rule: "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused". But that seems to get harder day by day.)

■ At the NRO Corner, Robert VerBruggen points out A Google Employee’s Awesome ‘Anti-Diversity Screed’.

But it’s not anti-diversity, and it’s not a screed. It’s written calmly and reasonably well, and it makes entirely legitimate points.

And that's correct. The "anti-diversity screed" label is applied by the tech sites Gizmodo (where you can read the document in question) and Engadget (where you can't). But is "anti-diversity" really a fair or accurate label to stick on a document that claims right at the top

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.

No, of course not. The author is making his dissent against Progressive ideology, not "diversity". And, as you can expect, the response has been torrid. As in "burn the witch" torrid. The Engadget article, for example, claims the document is "evidence that a toxic culture still exists within tech companies." And reduces the author to a knuckle-dragging caricature. For example:

He contended that women had low representation in software engineering due to biological differences (because they prefer people more than things, he claims), and said that the company should drop attempts to include different cultures and genders to instead focus on accommodating conservative social views.

But what the author actually says isn't that controversial, and is carefully stated, for example::

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

Gizmodo also quotes the response of Danielle Brown, who is Google's "Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance". Here's the meaningless deference to free expression:

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.

Reader, I suspect you can guess the very next word.

But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.

The author is a brave soul, and Google may well prove his point about its "intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology."

■ Speaking of heretics, your Tweet du Jour is from Charles Murray, featuring a long quote from Niall Ferguson:


Last Modified 2018-12-28 3:06 PM EDT