“The politics of Google has been in the spotlight since the online giant seemingly fired an employee for challenging liberal orthodoxy,” Paul Bond reports for The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a situation tailor-made for Sabo, and the conservative street artist struck before the sun rose on Friday, plastering the Venice area of Los Angeles, all around some offices where Google and its YouTube unit reside, with disparaging posters in some very hard-to-reach areas.”
“The posters, some of them exceedingly large and very high up, some plastered onto bus-stop benches, some behind glass looking like official advertisements, contrast Google with Apple, distorting the latter’s catchphrase to suggest that thinking different at Google won’t produce world-changing products, it will get you fired,” Bond reports. “The controversy that Sabo is exploiting concerns Google’s vp of diversity, integrity and governance Danielle Brown publicly chastising an employee who wrote a memo chastising Google for what he thinks is an obsession with diversity.”
“In Sabo’s artwork, Pichai’s image appears alongside the image of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and both logos from the tech giants are also present,” Bond reports. “In some posters, Apple’s tagline ‘Think Different’ is alongside Google’s logo with the text ‘Not So Much.’ In other posters, it’s alleged that thinking different gets you hired at Apple but fired at Google.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This artwork is incisive, but ultimately flawed.
We know for a fact that there are employees at Apple who keep their political, religious, economic, and other views under wraps because the corporate climate is not welcoming and they fear being ostracized or worse. So, casting Apple as the white knight here glosses over the pervasiveness of the issues of political correctness, groupthink and the like. In a truly open environment, you’d see ideas from across the spectrum being discussed without fear of reprisal. At Apple and, obviously, Google and many other places of employment, this is sadly not the case. Apple and many other companies most certainly have ideological echo chambers, too.
This is not to excuse Google. Far from it. Apple is simply not in the clear here, either.
Think Different, indeed.
• I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. ― S.G. Tallentyre
• I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think. — Hal Holbrook
• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ― George Orwell
Former Google engineer James Damore’s original memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” can be read in full here.
SEE ALSO:
James Damore: Why I was fired by Google – August 12, 2017
Here’s why the tech industry doesn’t need more female software engineers – August 9, 2017
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
With great power comes great responsibility.
Freedom of speech means you can say what you want. But you need to bear the consequences.
Google does not limit speech. They would love everyone who thinks like Damore to say it out loud so they could fire all of them. That would be best for everybody.
If you disagree with the fundamental values of your employer, you should not get fired, you should resign.
So, by your “logic,” 4+ billion Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths cannot work at Apple because Tim Cook is a homosexual who uses the Apple company name to support — and wants company employees to march in — Gay Pride parades which directly contradicts their fundamental values.
The word “homosexual” isn’t actually in the Bible, it was added in the 1940s by old white men. All the passages most people think are about condemning homosexuality actually aren’t. Those passages are actually condemning inequality, idol worship, rape, acting against your true nature, etc. The Bible has a long history of being misinterpreted to promote an agenda, such as using the Bible to argue slavery is just fine, or that women shouldn’t vote or have positions of leadership, or that interracial marriage is bad, or to argue against civil rights, and more. The war against the LGTBQ community is just another abuse of scripture.
Uninteresting Fart is more like it.
Old Testament, Leviticus 20:13
“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”
And, since you failed to mention it, what about the Koran? Was homosexuality “added in the 1940s by old white men” to the Koran, too?
Which, as it’s the Old Testament, is the Torah. All the abrahamic religions have this condemnation. And there is no mention in the New Testament, the xian additions, of Jesus repudiating these rules, as he did for some others.
Actually, it is mentioned in the New testament. Romans 1:18-32 — MORE SPECIFICALLY: Romans 1:26-30 …
oops, so much for that theory, huh Opsono?
What he said was that, even though Jesus (and the early Church) loosened some OT rules, there was no mention that Jesus repudiated – cancelled – the OT rules against homosexual behavior; in other words, that the rule is still in force in Christianity.
@Interesting Fact:
What you wrote is demonstrably false, and a false narrative promulgated by “gay theology” promoters ever since the beginning of the gay right era of the 70s. For thousand of years of interpretation from all mainstream schools of interpretation, the Bible expressly condemns homosexual practices. I’d rather you believe the book to be homophobic, and stay intellectually honest, than lie about it completely.
No, but if as a “person of faith” you put out a 10-page missive on Apple’s corporate mail saying that Tim Cook is an outlier because generally homosexuals are by nature too emotionally fragile to hold high positions or work in tech, yeah, Tim would fire your ass in a heartbeat, and be justified in doing so.
He’s not saying women are too emotionally fragile, he’s saying that quotas are dumb since women are more likely to enjoy pursuits other than tech. We can’t force women to stop being stay at home mom’s just so Google can hit a 50% quota.
The “emotionally fragile” part was not the point. I was just using that as an example of a rash generalization based on stereotypes that you cannot utilize when trying to run a company. About the only thing that Damore was on point about was that men are as stuck in their traditional roles as women. Men aren’t allowed to be stay-at-home dads without ridicule just like women aren’t allowed to be tech geeks without harassment. You’d never have to worry about quotas if society freed us to do what we like. This has nothing to do with biological predispositions.
The women at Google (who may or may not be a part of a program fostering diversity) were not dragged from their homes leaving their screaming babies to fend for themselves. They chose a career in tech. What Damore said was that they are biologically unsuited for this “pursuit,” and whether you believe that or not, you cannot run a company based on that assumption
I work at Apple Inc.
Given our CEO/corporate stance on certain issues, there is no way any questioning can be allowed or tolerated.
For example: Climate change. Al Gore is on our BoD. Tim Cook has declared that “the time for talk is over” and “climate change is real” among other statements.
Well, yeah, climate change is as real as it was back in the time of the dinosaurs, when there were no humans around to leave “carbon footprints.”
At Apple, there is no way I would feel comfortable questioning just how much humans contribute to climate change (an important data point for deciding how much to spend and on what) and how much nature contributes. The unspoken corporate line is that humans are 100% the cause and that humans must and can control the climate. I don’t agree with this – precisely because no one knows how much of climate change is anthropomorphic (caused by humans) and how much is natural (sun, tilt of earth, volcanic activity, etc. – each of which falls outside the realm of human control).
I believe that research that identifies the Sun as a major driver of global climate change must be taken more seriously and that a large measure of climate change hysteria has been fueled by those with other interests (i.e. those who’d like to redistribute wealth globally), but I could never say any of that inside Apple Inc.
So, basically, “Think Different” is a lie.
If you work in any part of Apple’s operations that requires data analysis or scientific expertise, you are well to keep quiet. They probably don’t care if the guys who sell phones or move boxes understand scientific facts.
Nobody has ever claimed that humans are 100% the cause of climate change, only that a very substantial part of the change since the Industrial Revolution is attributable to the observed (not hypothesized) increase in the proportion of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, which can be shown (not guessed) to be in proportion to the increased burning of carbon fuels and destruction of green plants, and the observed (not hypothesized) effect of those gasses in retaining the heat coming in from the sun. We might debate the proportion of warming that is anthropogenic, but it is foolishness to claim that humans don’t have an effect that can be mitigated to some degree.
Free speech is the right to proclaim one’s opinions, even if they are mistaken. It does not confer the right to repeat falsehoods about verifiable matters of fact with no consequences. The Google guy didn’t just have an opinion about women; he supported it with palpably fake science. It is a problem for a STEM company to have employees going public with sexist or racist pseudoscience.
The Paris Protocol, from which President Trump wisely removed the U.S.A. (causing unthinking Lib heads like Tim Cook’s to overheat), if it were even followed (which it wouldn’t be, nonbinding as it were) would have resulted in:
– An overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs;
– An average manufacturing shortfall of over 200,000 jobs;
– A total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four;
– An aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) loss of over $2.5 trillion; and
– Increases in household electricity expenditures between 13 percent and 20 percent.
Using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change developed by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even if all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were effectively eliminated, which the Paris Protocol did not call for, not even close, there would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures.
The “some degree” of your mitigation (job loss, income loss, GDP loss, electricity cost increases) is, in fact, total foolishness, for ZERO discernable benefit.
Fake news.
Those figures all assume that the US economy, absent the Paris Accord, would grow at a rate in excess of 4% annually. That is more than just slightly unlikely. They also assume that the economic benefits of noncompliance will not be offset, even partially, by the costs associated with higher sea levels and extreme weather that might be avoided.
They also ignore the simple fact that in sunny and windy parts of the country, green energy is already cheaper than natural gas, which is cheaper than Montana coal, which is cheaper than Appalachian coal. A shift in electrical generation is going to happen in any case. There are already cities in America that are producing more green energy than they consume in total energy, and are doing it for less cost than neighboring cities. Whether the federal government follows the Paris Accords or not, states, cities, and industry will be cutting emissions and affecting the overall national economy in much the same way.
The authors of the climate study you quote have already retracted most of the points that you are relying on. There were some really bad assumptions involved. For one, that even if America stopped all carbon emissions, the rest of the world would continue producing increased amounts of CO2 as if the Paris Accords were not in existence. For another, that a 0.2˚ C. temperature reduction would not provide discernible benefits.
Climate Change is a fraud and so are you.
period.
One would think that, in sunny Southern California, given your assertion that “green” energy is cheaper than the cheapest fossil-fuel energy, our energy prices would be among the lowest in the nation…
rather than among the highest.
Throwing around made-up “facts” does your case no good.
The key is cheaper to produce. You don’t really expect any reductions to passed on to the consumer, do you?
TxUser:
“palpably fake science”?
LOL.
The only thing fake is the false narrative you’re promoting.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/
Here are four academics with the requisite decades of study, research and published material that says he was on the mark.
Have fun reading.
“I believe that research that identifies the Sun as a major driver of global climate change must be taken more seriously”
do you believe that because you’ve sat down and rationally thought through it, or because it’s in line with your political ideology? I personally know I’m not qualified to judge it, but I’ve noticed a near perfect correlation between strong options on GW and the rest of their political leanings.
Tallentyre is a pseudonym for Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
A great scene from A Man for All Seasons:
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
The problem is not “Liberal Orthodoxy” because not all liberals subscribe to the high church of demographic bean counting in the name of diversity. The diversity police have hidden behind the term to batter white males in the hiring, promotion and other selective processes in corporate America, academia and government. Translation: diversity is usually a code word for reverse discrimination against males in general, white males in particular, straight white males more specifically, with American straight white males being the bullseye.
If I am running a company making widgets and am hiring 5 widget makers, I want the 5 best damn widget makers available REGARDLESS of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual identity, gender, faith or non-belief, nationality, etc. I really do not care if they are 5 straight Christian white guys or 5 sis gender male Japanese illegal aliens who worship Satan, or 5 Native American Dykes on Bikes or a rainbow of diversity that would make Baskin-Robbins jealous. I just want the best. All the rest is simply bullshit.
Equity – not equality is worth striving for. We will never be equal but we can seek a fair shot for everyone. Try as you might, you will never (fill in the blank) like (fill in the blank). No law or policy can make you better at anything, but it can give you a fair opportunity to succeed.
The problem is that “a fair shot for everyone” is not the same as hiring based on the similarities between the applicant and the existing workforce. Thinking different is easier to implement if a fair number of employees actually ARE different.
doublethink |ˈdəbəlˌTHiNGk|
noun
the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.
ORIGIN
1949: coined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Your argument that we can’t be diverse unless we’re diverse discounts every exception when a white man hires a black woman. Or does this never happen in the history of your universe?
“they fear being ostracized or worse”
If they fear liberals, then they’re not conservatives. Does anyone else find it strange that weaker conservatives are adopting liberal ideas of needing to “feel safe” and to be “treated special”?
Who on this board fears liberals?
James Damore does. Liberals just got him fired.
told ya…
Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports ‘is a big problem in a lot of the world’ and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.”
“‘It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public,’ said Mr Cook.
THAT is the voice of fascism.
We must keep the internet free from the government., Use the unbiased no tracking search engine that owns its own search results Lookseek.com try it Have a great day
thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try…have been using DuckDuckGo for the last four or five years.
interesting results: type “american inventors” in Google then type “american inventors” in lookseek.com
Wow, did what you suggested.
Google’s page opens with photos of “american inventors” across the top. 16 of the first 18 (that fit my window size) appear to be African-American. The 2 non-African-Americans are Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
Your search results may be different. (I did type in american inventors, not African-American inventors)
Don’t know if there is a “best” way to list results, but do find it interesting in light of the subject of this thread.
On the other hand, lookseek.com just gave a list of websites to further pursue.
Frankly they both suck. Google censors employees on work premises.
Apple censors its users.
Which is worse?
Apple won’t approve GAB’s iOS app, Google sucks but at least they allow it. And i’ll never ride in a “driverless car” made by either of them.
It cracks me up that people who have zero knowledge about climate science spout absolute nonsense, calling people libtards etc. they would rather listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or any other talking head when it comes to science. It’s as if these people start arguing about the genes involved in cancer and saying that p53 is not involved in cancer. The scientists studying cancer have researched this subject and have to undergo rigorous peer review trials. I will take the words of the climate scientists ( as well as cancer scientists) who research the subject versus trolls on TV, radio, and the internet. The issue is that throughout history conservatives have bashed scientists and tired to silence them. Just look at the burning at the stake of Bruni who said the earth is not the center of the universe which he proved it wasn’t based on science. Same thing happens when people say we shouldn’t help out special interests or minorities ; that is the modus operandi of conservatives. On the evolutionary tree of history conservatives of their times were pro-slavery, against minorities and their rights, against women’s sufferage rigths, religious intolerance. The list goes on and on. And those conservatives continue on today, calling other people’s rights as “special interest” or “identity politics”. It’s actually funny that people on an Apple website that spew nonsense and hatred toward others and are ant-science (which is apolitical by nature) are writing this stuff because of a very liberal, half Syrian founder. Pathetic indeed.
The Climate Change fraud has two purposes:
• To impose, without representation, a “carbon” tax to finance global governance.
• To further erode the economic might of the United States.
that is all.
botvinnik: Again, you are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts.
You cannot provide a reliable reference to one single person in authority, anywhere at anytime, who has advocated for a carbon tax to finance global governance. Please do not include any conspiracy theorists who allege that such evidence exists (but cannot provide a direct reference to it), or isolated leftist theoreticians who will never be in a position to implement their theories. I am aware of various voluntary funding schemes for rich nations to help poor nations with carbon mitigation, but those aren’t remotely plans for world governance.
Similarly, you cannot name anybody who is using Climate Change as an excuse to erode the economic might of the United States. Again, please do not cite people who are just generally opposed to the US and also happen to be among the 99% of world nations who signed the Accords.
…and 99% of the Inquisition once jailed Galileo.
“but, it moves.”
Argumentum ad populum – where a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because many people believe it to be so.
It’s ironic you are using the Galileo example where it was conservatives who attacked him despite him having science on his side. Don’t you see the irony of you using Galileo as an example of someone to argue against the scientists studying climate change? Laughable
Galileo would throw Algore and Bill Nye off the Tower of Pisa to see who hit the ground first….you see that irony, moron?
Galileo used the scientific method to make his point. Science is aplotical. You sir have no clue about science or the scientific method. And Al Gore and Bill Nye are not scientists and I don’t use them as examples of the scientific method. The problem is the conservatives get confused about history and science. You do realize that Galileo was put under house arrest by the conservatives of his time? Do you not understand that simple fact?
If science is apolitical, why did you note above that Galileo’s critics were “conservative?” You’re just another liar.
You have a problem with logic. Again you are proving my point. Galileo’s critics who were conservative fought against him not with science or the scientific method but rather because of their “beliefs”. And those people were conservatives. Hence, the example is appropriate for today’s environment where conservatives are using their “beliefs” to attack scientists and the scientific method. You need to go to go to a center of higher learning and reeducate yourself. But no wait. You won’t do that because those places are all bastions of liberals. and be beauty of the scientific method is that it is not written in stone like political views. It can change with new evidence.
To say that science is a political is what is laughable. I worked in a think tank in the early ’80s. ‘Science’ stated flatly that the world would run out of oil by 1990. When I questioned that ‘science’ fact, I was ridiculed and laughed at for questioning it. Everyone on the team shoved reams and reams of science papers at me to show me how stupid I was. Forgive me if I dare to question the ‘proof’ of the ‘science community of what’s happening now’.
‘apolitical’
correct…remember Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” from the 70’s?….we were all supposed to eat each other by 1991.
more horsepoop, just like Climate Fraud.
And, if I remember correctly, in my grade school years (late 60’s) the Earth was getting ready to enter another Ice Age. We were having a lot of cold winter days (loved to shoe skate on the ice in the schoolyard ditches in south Mississippi) and the reports were coming out that the Earth was cooling. I thought about how we would survive under loads and loads of ice.
And the United States was supposed to be getting oil from the Arab worlds so when those supplies ran out, the US would still have its own oil to then use.
And here I was, taught that Galileo was imprisoned for heresy.
TXUser: you’ve have to be a little biased, dulled, or ignorant to not know what the people in “authority” have in mind when promoting GW policy. “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer (where’s most of the world’s wealth?). He also said: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, has said similar things. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said. A simple assumption; she’s talking about “changing” capitalism, here. And continuing her statist mindset, she adds: “democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model.” Btw, the UN is all about “global governance” and apparently, capitalism creates governing problems for “them.” Popular green author & activist, Naomi Klein argues that “we have all been thinking about the climate crisis the wrong way around: it’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the 1980s and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening inequality”. She apparently hoped at one point that the Helsinki climate deal would be the great equaliser – “compensating Africa and Asia for colonialism.”
Simply said, it’s about money. He/she who holds the purse, drives the boat, or governs. Btw, I’m a bit of a nut when it comes to recycling, composting, repurposing. I garden organically, drive an underpowered truck, collect water, have a xeric landscape and more. In other words, I care about this topic, in the truest sense of the word, but aim to call a spade a spade when it smells funny…like this topic.
dead on.
Senior software engineer James Damore was a research scientist at MIT and Princeton. He was a brilliant student at the University of Illinois and graduated with a degree in microbiology, physics, and chemistry. Does his educational background confer on him validation, and/or authority to release that HR memo?
Whenever a writer describes a social argument in loaded political and religious terms, you have to question the motives of the author.
The guy was fired not just because of what he said, but where and how he said it. He used company resources to publicly promote his social concerns. He could have gone about this any number of other ways, but this was the approach that would generate the most controversy. It makes me wonder if he was even a productive employee. Perhaps he was headed towards firing, anyway, and figured that this approach might get him some sympathy and leverage against the company?
In the end, the guy took a risk and it bit him. Case closed.