good times
 

Re: I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit...
 

The Google Manifesto grossly generalizes, and is therefore ridiculous.

But considering all that's been written about it, I ran across one odd contradiction in many criticisms.

The benefit of diversity is bringing varied viewpoints and backgrounds to work, which obviously aids efficiency and creativity. This is, of course, because these people are different from each other to some extent. Why then do so many of the same people who rightly argue that point flip out when someone highlights the differences?

Men and women are different to a degree. So are people from Kansas and NYC, or people who are gay, straight, and bisexual.

Damore's piece was bluntly stupid in suggesting women are by nature unsuited to tech. But his critics should be careful not to argue any reference to differences between men and women is heresy. A more subtle assesment, like the article you cite, of those differences makes the case for diversity.

Sadly, I doubt the loudest voices in the debate over this "Manifesto" will read her, or consider anything beyond the most blunt arguments. Which, as always, pervert, simplify, and eclipse the discussion worth having.

Re: I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit...
 

Caveat that I've not read the memo:

There's a massive difference between diversity of experience, background and insight and difference in inherent ability. The former is the point of diversity. The latter is prejudice.

Re: I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit...
 

People are not flipping out because he "highlighted the differences" or "arguing any reference to differences between men and women is heresy." At least, not that I've seen.

Re: I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit...
 

I read "pervert" as a noun, and wonder what you know about Ty that I don't.

Hertz social media FTW
 

Re: I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit...
 

God knows I will never argue you're the most subtle thinker around, but you've put your finger on one very basic point that fundamentally eluded Damore, which is that even if there are differences, the combination of two viewpoints might be more powerful than either by themselves.

Damore was heading where the testosterone-addled right wing nutcases always head: women ought to make my sandwich, blacks ought to hoe my crops, sure, some might be helpful here and there, but not most of them, and, hey, I could use a sandwich. Yet, the mere fact that he couldn't figure out the benefits of diversity means he really kind of sucked at the job for which he thought he was biologically suited.

Damore and his defenders, like David Brooks, end up separated from the armed mob at Charlottesville by very little. Each of them are seeking to assert an innate superiority.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

If the ultimate goal is to remove Trump from the presidency, don't we want him to continue to act like an insane person in the short run? Assuming there is a real possibility of impeachment after Mueller completes his investigation? His outrageous acts just make impeachment easier for spineless republicans to remove him, right?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The only hope for impeachment is a Democratic majority house, and the only hope for conviction in a Senate Trial after that, and removal from the Presidency is... well, there isn't any. Republicans will muster 34 Senators to defend the possibility of naming Jeff Sessions to the next opening on the Supreme Court.

It has nothing to do with what Trump does, he's already shown that.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think it depends on what you're talking about. If by continuing "to act like an insane person in the short run," means encouraging white supremacists to arm themselves for a planned riot in which they kill people, I'm going to go with, "No." Similarly, if he jumps into a war (nuclear or not) because he wants to be a tough guy, again, no. Actually, there seem to be many examples I can list.

I agree with you what may be needed to get the spineless republicans to act, but if the evidence of collusion and financial impropriety is there, I don't think we should have to keep building a case on the backs of every vulnerable community in the country.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Democrats ought to focus on what they can do, rather on what they hope Trump does, since no one (least of all himself) can control him. This means, e.g., spending less time imploring him to say things that he won't say, and more time figuring out how to use his white-nationalist dog whistles as a wedge issue to split off members of his coalition. For once, I agree with Bill Kristen: "I've got to say, I'm sick of the imploring & pleading with Donald Trump to say the right thing. He said what he meant & meant what he said." Figure out how to use it as a weapon.

Charlottesville
 

So, someone on facebook posted over the weekend that it is amazing how everyone* seems to rally to condemn white nationalists, supremacists, and Nazis who are armed to the teeth and out marching in full racist gear looking to start trouble (and actually killing people). But when racism isn't wearing a uniform and takes the form of policy, everyone seems to be completely fucking silent. (Okay, maybe they didn't say that exactly, but that was the sentiment.)

When Sessions states that he's not going to continue the fucking agreed upon consent decrees and federal monitoring that Obama's DOJ reached with police departments who were found by the Justice Department to be violating people's rights, where the fuck is everyone?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/u...rime.html?_r=0

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...404-story.html

When the Trump Administration decides to exclude violent white supremacists from a government anti-terrorism program and focus its efforts solely on Islamist extremism, why is everyone so quiet?

http://fortune.com/2017/02/02/trump-...macists-islam/

It's very easy to point at some jackass dressed up as a Nazi and say, "That guy sucks." But we need people to be outraged at the institutional policies this racist Administration is putting in place to empower these very same people.

TM

*Well, almost everyone.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Well what should happen and what will happen are two different things. In the short run we just have to keep him away from the nuke button. His refusal to condemn white nationalists is to going to make it easier to remove him, right? Or maybe the country has gone completely nuts (possible) and it will make him more popular. Is it Lucy from Peanuts who yells "STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF!"?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I hear you. But I agree with 3Greedy. Republicans do not care about this White Nationalist stuff. Rubio and Cruz are just trying to seem Presidential. And the rest are fully behind Sessions and the Administration's racist policies and his flirtation with these groups which make up large swaths of their base. Nothing this guy does is going to get him impeached. Hell, he's shitting all over them and blaming them for his inability to lead. They can lose on every single piece of legislation they want to put in place. As long as they can continue to fill the courts with right wing lunatics, they're going to go along with his bullshit.

You heard McConnell after the embarrassing defeat of his bullshit healthcare bill. "Even on the night when we came up one vote short of our dream to repeal and replace Obamacare, here's the first thing I thought about — feel better, Hillary Clinton could be president."

As the country burns around them, that statement is all that Republicans stand for.

TM

Exactly.
 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpWsb9rUkAA3alH.jpg

TM

Re: Exactly.
 

Between Trump and the Republicans and some of the hiring/employment/promotion stuff I've been involved in of late, I am starting to think I am finally gaining a small bit of insight into James' Baldwin's seminal quote on rage. I am feeling rage in my dreams.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think we can stall him, I think we can put blockades up, I think we can limit the damage, but I also think we're going to spend the rest of our long lives trying to repair what damage occurs, if we're lucky.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

There are ways in which Trump is completely ineffectual, and other ways in which it feels like he is making a huge difference.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I'll cite Niall Ferguson once more:

The progression is Economic Malaise > Nationalism/Tribalism > Scapegoating > Regional Skirmishes > Possibilly, Global Conflict

Trump is a symptom, not a primary cause. Yes, he's an accelerant, and a agitator at the worst time. But historically, that's the only time people like him come to power.

This is not a defense of Trump. This is a request that people consider the broadest possible context, because what we've got happening must be addressed. And if Trump gets hit by a bus tomorrow, it's still going to happen. If Hillary'd won, it'd still be happening, just differently. Or perhaps identically, or in a more lurid manner.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. If society makes this an exclusively or even mainly Donald Trump thing, it'll never fix any of the causes of things like Charlottesvillle.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The tech titans getting NZ citizenship sounds like a joke. Until you consider what this place is going to look like in 10 years.

We have a population of people who expect a standard of living fewer and fewer are going to be able to retain in the more-near-than-distant future.

Think China's a demographic time bomb? How aren't we right behind them?

We needed a New Deal infrastructure jobs program in 2000. Instead, we papered over the tech collapse with a r/e bubble.

We keeping trying to avoid taking our medicine... Good luck to us.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I'm just pissed because I'm fed up with bigots. Screw who you want to blame it on, there's no excuse for it, whether on a street in Charlottesville or in an office building in Boston.

And I have unkind words for anyone who wants to try to excuse it.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I'm not sure what you think Ferguson has to say here that Karl Marx didn't say earlier and better.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Your argument is more convincing when you don't cite someone without any credibility.

I mean, I don't think anyone doesn't see a relationship between economic malaise and nationalist/racist flair ups.

It's just that anyone who knows anything about the history of this country also knows that economics does not hardly explain our racism.

And even if you want to use economic performance to analyze white nationalism, you really need to deal with it's relationship to perceived gains by black people.

Trump isn't a symptom of economic malaise. He's a symptom of outrage that we elected a black president and that black lives were in danger of mattering while some white people weren't getting ahead.

Maybe, but I don't know, given that pretty much all of the political order has been willing to forgo/condemn the worst of it. I don't think any other conceivably possible occupant of the White House would employ Steve Bannon, for example.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This is like saying that the Holy Roman Empire wasn't Holy, Roman or an Empire. It's satisfyingly simple and provocative, but surely the truth is more complicated.

Like I was saying.

Why not both?

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I keep toying with the following ideas, and I'm going to put them out here even though I'm not done with them yet.

Obama and Democrats stand, more or less, for the principle of equality. Obama's election was a realization of a promise of equality for people of color that had previously seemed more notional than real. Lots of people turned out to be more comfortable with that in principle than in the White House.

Trump stands for traditional hierarchies, in all sorts of ways. He is utterly uninterested in the principle of equality. His views on race are pretty clear. He is pleased to discriminate between religions. He unabashedly hires rich people because they're better. MAGA is about restoring an American where people knew their place. So is law and order. Arguably, his views on immigration are not really about removing immigrants from the country, but about imposing on them a second-class status which subordinates them to the rest of the country.

On this view, most Republicans are good with this. A few are really committed to the principle of equality and also limited government, and struggle with Trump, but it turns out that most liked limited government because they were opposed to the federal government's ability/propensity to level traditional hierarchies and act on the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment.

eta: A great many Republicans are more concerned with the zero-sum game over political power and status within this country than they are with things like growth and opportunity and growing the pie, and this is because they are acutely conscious of the status they have lost and are losing, and that their political coalition is smaller, population-wise and waning. This is why Republicans are basically OK with voter suppression -- it preserves their place.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Gorsuch gets a lifetime pass from me because he affirmed the granting of an SJ in my favor in the 10th.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I've no time for bigots. They're a mix of idiots who don't know better and evil degenerates.

But if we make Trump the focal point of opposition, we fall into a trap. He becomes a martyr to an asshole demographic, and a blame magnet for those seeking to simplify a complex problem.

The entirety of our culture is worth indicting for institutional bigotry. And I could be wrong here, but among many others, a big reason is, every time we're faced with a crisis, there's an effort to blame An Other. It's easier to hate a Mexican than to assess one's own failure to attain a skill set resilient through a downturn. It's easier to detest a welfare mother rather than honestly scrutinize one's foolish assumption he'd always have a job at some factory or corporate concern, Just Like Dad.

The real target of ire for these Left Behind sorts are the managers of global capital. The titans of industry (actually, finance) who golf at Trump's courses. These are the people who offshore, who automate, and who eliminate the positions these fungible worker bees occupied.

It needs to be stated clearly to these people. The Black, Mexican, Asian, or Jewish guy down the block isn't taking urrr job. A guy you'll never meet in Indonesia is taking urrr gig. A guy in Silicon Valley writing an app that makes your cubicle toil unnecessary is takin' urrr work. And the billionaire you voted for, and his buddies, are making a fat margin on both of you. His only carry cost is paying a compliant media and political class, and armies of advertisers and PR flunkies to keep you dumb white fucks blaming immigrants when things get really bad. It's divide and conquer. It's just that simple. And you white supremacists? You're the ultimate suckers at the table.

Or maybe I'd just go with Jello Biafra's simple approach: "Nazi punks, fuck off! Fuck off!"

"Phony patriotic rednecks is what's bringing our country down..."
 

Jello's 1985 rant is as timely as ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp50gSJPFpE

Re: "Phony patriotic rednecks is what's bringing our country down..."
 

They need to do a reunion tour. Too bad he hates the rest of the band. In fairness to them, however, he must be a serious handful.

You can apply so many of their songs today. "Police Truck" (for the Law 'N Urder crowd), "Holiday" (for the HuffPo Reader demo), "California Uber Alles" (for everyone who thinks, "Positive politics will save us!"), "Too Drunk To Fuck" (the Opioid addled set), "Pull My Strings" (the Hollwood crowd), "Kill the Poor" (the Big Pharma Opioid sales crowd, and the repeal ACA cabal), and of course, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" (for the Breitbart reader).

Re: "Phony patriotic rednecks is what's bringing our country down..."
 

it's an hour long? I saw a concert by the Marine band around 85 at the
Jefferson Memorial. Across the water on the mall was a punk concert with the DK's. Suddenly, at a quiet point from the Marines, JB starts yelling "FUCK THE MARINES!!!"

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCrABvZy8uc

From Facebook, I'm friends with a black man who lives in a small town in NC. The guy is a 20 year army vet. A professor at a small college. He runs a farm. I know him because he is one of the most popular story tellers in the country right now. He has 5 kids.

He drives past lots of homes with Confederate Battle Flags. End of the day, the people at UVA last weekend could stay safe by avoiding the rabble. GGG next week in Boston, I'm betting he'll be okay.

But my friend in Bumfuck NC, and his kids? I'm not sure I can promise him he shouldn't worry about Nazis. And I'm 100% sure he isn't looking at the threat as an opportunity to laugh at the ignorance of the Nazis.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

HBO's Vice News had a remarkable piece last night on Charlottesville. It was mostly from the standpoint of interviewing the pro-Nazi supremacists.

After watching it, I came to the dismal conclusion that the Nazi thugs would view the video and say "Yes! That's who we are!"

And the people who stood up to these pigs would watch the video and say "Yes! That's who they are!"

The video is here:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...1NSdc9lZnJrDdg

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think this credits him with thinking deeply enough to have a vision. The description you offer is deadly accurate, but it's the Bannon wing of his administration's view, not his own personal view. I still think, based on what I've seen, his personal views are non-existent. The man cares about nothing beyond winning whatever zero sum game in which he's engaged.

His criticism of the Nazis at Charlottesville was forced not because it's contrary to his personal beliefs, but because it's a capitulation. In that moment, the "Left Wing Media" was forcing him to say something. Forcing Donald Trump to do anything is beating him -- it's him losing. And he hates losing. (Dumb fucker still has no clue that, had he given a strong speech about Charlottesville a few days earlier, properly condemning Nazis, he'd be "winning" in the meta debate with the media.)

Squaring equality and limited govt is a tricky thing when you expand "the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment." Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws are fine. But where does that "promise" end? The friction is between those who see it as a limited thing, and those who think it should apply more widely, with a govt not only redressing the effects of slavery and Jim Crow, but also using all sorts of policies to effect desired social behaviors.

The country owes a debt to those it enslaved. Nobody argues that. But under this umbrella, how much license is given for the country to tell businesses how they must act in regard to numerous other minorities who were not enslaved? We've expanded the "promise" you note to a degree a lot of Republicans feel goes far beyond what is prudent.

I don't know where the line ought to be. I don't think anyone does. And I think it changes all the time, making this subject all the more difficult.

Privately, a great many are following a simpler logic: Get as much as you can while you can, and find a way to protect it. A lot of Democrats are following the same plan. This is understandable in an environment where there's so much potential volatility lurking in so many corners. At core, it's always the lizard brain at work. And the lizard brain's only real concern is survival and lifestyle protection (Read: Money).

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

You know that they hate those people regardless, right? Like, who among them is losing in competition with Jews, for example?

Yes, let's substitute one inaccurate scapegoat for another. It will totally work.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yes and no. It was forced because he knows what he's trying to communicate. He originally condemned violence "from all sides" because he knew that his Nazi backers would hear it as a condemnation of the antifa. He waited two days to condemn them because he knew they would read it as forced and insincere. He re-tweeted a Nazi and a train running someone over this morning because he knows it will communicate his support to them. They got the message.

I don't know or care whether he does that because he personally agrees with them. He's doing to to keep their support and that's bad enough.

Lots of people do in fact argue that.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

All of us are too quick to see him as a calculating salesman who doesn't have beliefs, when some of his beliefs are right out there. He kept hammering on the birther thing even when it made him a laughingstock. He thinks the Central Park Five should have been put to death and won't accept that they're innocent. His narcissism and insecurity play a bigger role in motivating him in the moment, but still.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

He urged everyone to respect our history. That was a white supremacist dog whistle.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yes, that too. I should have included it.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Hey, we should get together when you're here! Pick a day and place.

You do realize Boston is the next gathering place for the Nazis this Saturday, and that our holocaust memorial was vandalized yesterday, and there have been a couple of harassing incidents around it during the clean up?

These fuckers are feeling their oats, because they feel like they have a friend in the big very white building in DC. That's why I'd love to be around to just show the flag (the real one) when they're here, though I'm going to be out of town on vacation through the next week.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Look, there may be an element of this, but also remember that, fundamentally, he's a white asshole, a thug-wanna-be, from Queens circa 1960s. There are plenty of racists and even white supremacists in that crowd. He's one of them.