“Ad hominem is a notoriously weak logical argument. And is usually used to distract the focus of a discussion - to move it from an indefensible point and to attack the opponent."
It's not an ad hominem to note past history of a group that will be moderating a public forum when they have a demonstrable poor track record of moderating public fora.
Unless something changes relative to the user ecosystem Gab has attracted in the past, I predict I'll be blackholing their domains on every machine I personally administer because nobody in my family needs to be exposed to that nonsense.
Clearly it wasn't just saying "build the wall," from your own link:
> All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
> I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
> I could give a shit less about your respect for me or anyone else's. Build the wall is exactly what the fuck it means: build the wall.
At almost any office job in America this is not an acceptable way to talk to your colleagues. At what programming job am I allowed to call people cucks for disagreeing with my politics?
1. The same principle applies, unless you want to argue that YC should have lower standards than the average tech job.
2. I don't know much about this person, but I'm going to need something more than his word on this one. The much more obvious explanation that it was his behavior towards other founders.
“The main thing I want to get across here is: we believe that everyone is entitled to their political beliefs and they are welcome to support the political candidates of their choosing. Having an honest, rational dialogue between all parts of the political spectrum is going to be important for us as a country moving forward. But under no circumstances do we tolerate harassing or threatening other founders (or anyone for that matter). Regardless of what you believe, if you act in a hostile way that makes the community feel unsafe, you will be ejected from the YC community.”
Specifically, he resigned due to protest/pressure relating to his 1000 dollar donation in support of prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage in CA).
It seems inconceivable to me that his resignation was unrelated to this. An excerpt from his resignation announcement:
> I have decided to resign as CEO effective today, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of u, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader.
They don't have to. The singular monotone reaction from the top echelon is message enough. I'm no fan of Trump or his policies, but neither am I a fan of an environment where it is assumed we all have the same political views. For a company of over 100k employees, an event like that can't be seen as inclusive.
I probably wouldn't feel welcome at Fox News. Can I force them to become more liberal in the name of "diversity of thought"? Or does that meme only work when it's trying to promote people on the right?
Google can do whatever they want as long as they are honest about it. If they want to call themselves “The progressive search engine” then at least they are being upfront about it.
It certainly wasn't scientific, so it's hard to argue it was some sort of decrying of the fall of rationality. He had a singular reason to write it, I argue a sexist one.
Seeing as he didn't have science to back up his claims.
I find it increasingly fascinating that in the response to Damore's memo people continually provide evidence that this echo chamber does indeed exist, and that people actually are reading different things from the same text.
It's not? Where do you think rights come from? The question of who has rights to do what is the central question of politics. Pretending that questions of rights are not questions of politics is a sleight-of-hand move that is designed to put your opponents on the defensive and reverse the burden of proof.
Politics is the debate of honest ideas and philosophies regarding governing. Arguing whether a given right should be granted to certain groups of people based on race, sex, creed, or sexual orientation is not about governing.
> Arguing whether a given right should be granted to certain groups of people based on race, sex, creed or sexual orientation is not about governing
It's not? What is it then? Where do you think rights come from? Rights only exist insofar as government guarantees those rights. I only have the right to life because the are police and armed forces who guarantee that right to me. I only have the right to liberty because the Constitution, via the fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth amendments, restricts what the government can do to me.
The question of who does or does not get rights, and how those rights are adjudicated when they conflict is an inherently political question. It is the root of a philosophical debate that goes back to Ancient Greece. To claim it is not political is to remove the all questions of ethics from politics. It is to reduce politics to a mere math problem, solvable by technocrats.
If I'm stuck on a deserted island, dying of thirst, will my right to life grant me a rainstorm? If I'm stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, dying of hypothermia, is my right to life going to magically conjure a fire? If a warlord invades my village, and puts a sword at my throat, will my right to life stay his hand? Every right is an obligation insofar as there has to be an enforcement mechanism to guarantee that right. That enforcement mechanism is government, governments are controlled by politics, and thus the question of who has which rights is inherently political.
> Throughout history, farmers haven't really fucked with each other
The actual history of the world begs to differ. The inception of agriculture is contemporaneous with the inception of large scale wars for a reason. Hunter gatherer bands may fight, but their fights are usually small scale, both because the bands themselves are small (not very many resources to fight with) and because they have the option of moving (nothing worth fighting for). Farming communities, with their higher population densities, both have the resources to fight larger scale battles, and reason to fight.
Saying gay people shouldn't get married isn't a political opinion, it is you said it first, just hating arbitrarily a randomly assigned group of people.
Are you suggesting it's the same ballpark as saying "I don't like the current elected official?"
And people wonder why politics is so divisive now. It’s not longer about disagreeing with someone, it’s about painting them as immoral and not worth engaging.
Have concerns about immigration levels? You hate immigrants and that’s wrong.
Worried about crime? You hate minorities and that’s wrong.
Worried about government spending on welfare? You hate the poor and that’s wrong.
> But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm.
> Again, though, most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace (accounting for, perhaps, a few percentage points of the variability between men’s and women’s performances). Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex.
The problem in the employee's memo seems to be correlating scientific data (which is accurate) to groups of people (women) at Google and their qualifications (inaccurate).
~ Lord Aquitainus Attis