Closet conservatives (and other moral minorities) across the Valley are now virtually guaranteed to shut their closet doors even tighter.<p>Post election, I recall my timelines erupt with emotion -- outrage, despair, betrayal -- then subdue to reflection. Some called for the need to truly reach out to those across the aisle and to listen and understand, earnestly lending an ear even to views that we strongly oppose.<p>Recent events will be a step back in such relations, as dissent has been dismissed demonstrably without such considerations.<p>When the people we must understand in order to reach bipartisanship go into hiding for fear of being outed, broadening our perspective becomes difficult.
You can say whatever you want. You can be as loathsome or virtuous as you'd like on your own time and dime. But the moment what you say goes contrary to the shared expectations of the company you belong to or negatively impacts how business is done, you're finished.<p>Is this a difficult or arguable point?
So much comes to mind:<p>* hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.<p>* much of kitchen hygiene are just rituals.<p>* early infanticide isn't so bad.<p>(Avoiding gender stuff because that's been done to death)
What you can't say: True democracy doesn't have elections. In fact already the ancient greek knew: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election” (Aristotle, Politics), see also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition</a>)
> So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?<p>Might it be true that women are just naturally much less attracted to STEM than men?<p>For the record, I think even among men, being attracted to STEM or even good at it is rather rare. It's probably even rarer among women.<p>EDIT: I wonder if the downvotes are because I'm going offtopic or because I can't say that?
The irony of this post when you will get reported and hellbanned for questioning libertarianism on HN. As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.<p>I'd wager good money I'm a lot closer to that Conrad character than the author will ever be and from where I'm sitting it's pretty clear that tech culture has started becoming completely toxic. The article reads as if written by a psychopath (and one begins to wonder whether Evgeny Morozov has a point about SV's movers and shakers). Putting aside the shallow and barely informed notions about fashion and art themselves, dismissing morality as no more than a seasonal fad or craze is itself an unwitting confession of a deep-seated amorality.
I suspect this getting up-voted is about the Google engineer's diversity essay. How about instead of framing it in terms of what you can't say politically, let's rephrase it another way:<p>Imagine you make a post inside your company Slack complaining all your colleagues are stupid and unqualified. You'd probably be reprimanded right?<p>Didn't that guy basically just do that but only about his female and minority colleagues (and future female and minority colleagues)? Don't we all monitor our words at least a bit at work for the sake of the day going smoothly?<p>And if he's so correct about Google's diversity initiatives being a problem and/or failure why doesn't he start a company that only hires men to take advantage of the market inefficiency in hiring (if you say hiring laws would get in the way, when is the last time a company paid a serious price for failing to have diverse hires)?<p>The most upvoted HN comments on threads about the diversity manifesto reek of protecting the status of the people already at the top. And are as flimsy and irrational as they claim the liberal values they decry are. White men have traditionally been in power in this country and suppressed the rights of women & minorities to vote, educate themselves & work for years. How can we know that another group wouldn't be historically more powerful without a control group study where each group is allowed to be a historical oppressor for an equal amount of time?