The author indicts Trump's use of language. While his speech does have a certain word salad quality, the left's use of language has been far more damaging. The proponents of academic intersectionality have been using language in a characteristic manner, the effect of which is to attach the emotional valence of an everyday English word to a politically charged concept, giving the language abuser a cudgel with which to beat his political opponents.
Word | Meaning in 1990 English
---------+--------------------------
Gender | Personality
Violence | Critique
Harassment | Disagreement
Safety | Uniformity
Diversity | Uniformity
Unsafe | Controversial
Equal | Identical
Sexist | Non-discriminatory
Racist | Non-discriminatory
Problematic | Dissident
Biased | Discerning
You may find the above table inflammatory, but I didn't intend it as such. My table reflects a real abuse of the language of the sort the author of the article describes. People at work have said that "violent and oppressive ideas" require physical violence as "self-defense". These people were referring to mere words. Others have claimed that to be "safe", people with disagreeable opinions must not be allowed to speak. Obviously, words are not violence (1990 term), even if some people call them "violence" (2017 academic left term).
The same shift in denotation (but deliberately not connotation) features in discussions of concepts like "decolonialism", "science", and "culture".
If that isn't authoritarian language, what is?
I don't blame the right generally and Trump specifically for playing the same game. Unfortunately, the only winning move is not to play.
The EU's power structure is currently occupied by people who reject the idea of value judgements, by post-modernists who don't understand the fragility of civilization. They literally believe that no thing is better than any other thing and that forcing equality of outcome is the highest virtue.
These people will do a lot of damage before their system collapses.
Counterexample: big parts of fintech have workplace cultures straight out of the 50s, dress codes and all. They're much less diverse than regular tech. SJW remedies for social ills never work, and they usually have extremely undesirable side effects.
People who crusade for diversity and inclusion usually start with innocuous measures, but after these approaches fail to bring about Utopia, these people always end up crudely 1) attempting to destroy any fun the workplace, and 2) imposing a limit on how much strong contributors can contribute. The end state for a D&I-focused workplace is one full of frowns and formal business attire and promotion by seniority and endless paranoia about innocuous comments landing people in HR.
Nature did not spread human talent evenly among her people. Terrible things happen when we try to force nature to conform to our ideological preferences.
Congratulations, SJWs. When you exile someone with legitimate technical chops from polite society, you'll get work on projects with which polite society disagrees. I hope this is the future you wanted, because it's the future you deserve. You did this. This is your fault.
If I were on a team where management tried to micro-manage conversion toward some ideal of "diversity", then believe me, "empathy" would not be the emotion I would be feeling.
Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.
Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.
> No one said anything about removing code reviews. They said remove the culture of aggressive and mean code reviews.
In practice, that means making code review comments unclear and extremely passive aggressive. I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both.
> No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.
The proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse.
> Meritocracy is a red herring.
This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit.
> And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes
This argument is circular. You're defining literally anything that might make women choose to not come to "tech" as being sexist. Never mind that women get all sorts of preferences; never mind that women are paid more these days. It's all about how there are more men than women, therefore we have a "problem" that we need to "fix".
The entire purpose of a code review is to highlight things that are wrong. You can't point out things that are wrong without someone being able to spin your comments as some kind of toxic masculine impulse to show basal-primate technical dominance through demonstration of superior shamanistic technical knowledge.
Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a buffer overflow.
Wow. So in the name of getting women women into tech, we need to abandon
* Code reviews, design documents, and anything else that might provide a forum for "chest thumping"
* Opportunities to express one's love of traditionally geeky things
* Organic conversation during happy hour
* Meritocracy (since diversity pushes end up being affirmative action in practice)
Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech. Maybe that's okay, and people like you are doing significant damage trying to create an unnatural situation of exact equity that nobody really wants.
Mozilla doesn't pay nearly as well as the top tech companies out there do. Maybe the people who are left after all the best people leave end up making bad decisions. Human capital matters.
Of course Mozilla's decisions look foolish to us. We (for the most part) are not the ones who couldn't move on to greener pastures.
You are right. It's frustrating how often I see a good idea (like mandatory parental leave) being a thing for women instead of a thing for people in general.
I wish I could point out the problems with this identity-focused marketing. If I did so in public, using my real identity, I would be fired, or at least receive very harsh feedback. It is depressing to be unable to speak up for my own interests.
You may find the above table inflammatory, but I didn't intend it as such. My table reflects a real abuse of the language of the sort the author of the article describes. People at work have said that "violent and oppressive ideas" require physical violence as "self-defense". These people were referring to mere words. Others have claimed that to be "safe", people with disagreeable opinions must not be allowed to speak. Obviously, words are not violence (1990 term), even if some people call them "violence" (2017 academic left term).
The same shift in denotation (but deliberately not connotation) features in discussions of concepts like "decolonialism", "science", and "culture".
If that isn't authoritarian language, what is?
I don't blame the right generally and Trump specifically for playing the same game. Unfortunately, the only winning move is not to play.