It's not because I'm not interested in politics. The members of my family are almost all political junkies; I've never failed to vote in any election where I was eligible to do so, and I check the day's political news, in both Canada and the U.S., several times each day, including Sundays and holidays. It's not because I don't have opinions on the topics of the day, either; if you've read any significant part of this blog, you know that I have plenty of opinions, and that I'm not terribly shy about sharing them. That is, after all, why I started a blog in the first place: to share my opinions on various topics of interest to me.
The reason that I've been avoiding posts about politics is twofold. One, political discussions on the internet tend to turn to shit very quickly, with toxic comment sections, personal attacks, gratuitous doxxing, and death threats, and who the fuck needs that in their lives? No, thank-you; I'll stick to bashing big corporations, which (a) provides plenty of material to write about, and (b) generally involves less of the typical internet unpleasantness.
The second reason, though, is both simpler and less selfish: I prefer not to post on topics where I have little, if anything, to add to the discussion. Whenever possible, I restrict myself to posts on topics where (a) I have something to say, that (b) I'm not seeing expressed elsewhere. More than once, I've deleted a partially-drafted post because I realized partway through that I wasn't saying anything of worth.
Yes, I've been guilty of the odd "+1" post that's little more than a link to an article that I liked and a comment that I agreed with it, but I try to keep that to a minimum. I'm basically a dilettante, well-read on a wide range of topics, with interests that are broad but shallow. I feel comfortable bringing together tidbits about statistics, public relations, history, and technology, synthesizing them into what I hope is a coherent world-view that minimizes the effect of hype culture on my behaviour and my life.
Politics feels different, though. It so often gets really personal, really quickly, with people mistaking arguments about identity for arguments about policy (and vice versa) in a way that makes them resistant to facts that contradict their worldviews, and unwilling to listen to people from the "other side." I like to think that I'm reasonably well-informed about politics and current events, but I'm not usually not an expert in either the issues involved, or the details of the relevant political processes; I'm certainly not likely to be recognized as an expert by either side of a political debate.
Every once in a while, though, I feel compelled to step out of my comfort zone. And the blowup around Google's firing of the "anti-diversity" engineer (a.k.a. TADE) feels like one of those times... in part because the discussion around the event seems to be revealing a fundamental misunderstanding about what free speech is and isn't, why democratic societies have and need it, and why and when it's perfectly acceptable to limit it... limitations that are already enshrined in law, and not particularly controversial.
First, let's start with what free speech is, and why democracies need it.
Free, as in Speech.In order for a democracy to continue functioning as a democracy, the population must be able to talk about politics. They must be able to discuss matters of policy, and question or criticize elected officials, without fear of persecution. The press must be free to provide the people with accurate information about what candidates for office say about the day's issues, or what elected officials actually do once in office, without risk of reprisal. These things are essential, which is why every functioning democracy acknowledges and protects them.
In fact, one of the ways to know if a society has stopped functioning as a democracy is to watch for suppression of the free flow of political information. Democracies cannot equate dissent with disloyalty; to do so is to stop being a democracy, and become a dicatorship. Vladimir Putin is considered to be a de facto dictator, in spite of having been nominally elected, in no small part because Russian reporters and Putin's political opponents keep being persecuted, prosecuted, or killed, both inside Russia and abroad. The same applies, to varying extents, for Erdoğan in Turkey, and for Maduro in Venezuela, and so on.
Free speech is so essential to the functioning of democracy, that the right of people to speak freely was the first amendment added to the constitution of the United States:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."However, while free political speech is an indispensable tool for any functioning democracy, the right to freely say whatever the fuck you please, with no consequences whatsoever, is really not. The right of individuals to speak freely has, and always had, well-recognized limits in law in all functioning democracies.
Yes, even in the U.S.A. Yes, really.
"Shouting fire in a crowded theatre"
This is the short-hand example normally given for "speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic" (thanks, Wikipedia), but it's far from the only example where courts, even in the U.S., have established that the individual's protected right to speak their minds must take a back seat to consideration of the well-being of those around them. You can't, for example, legally incite people to riot, or to incite violence generally; even in the U.S., death threats are not protected speech; and so on.
Bringing things back to the topic du jour, loudly opining to your entire workplace that, for example, all women are congenitally intellectually inferior to men, and should never be hired for any STEM job, ever, because any man that applies will automatically be better qualified for the work simply by virtue of having a "Y" chromosome... that's not protected speech. The relevant phrase, here, is "creating a hostile work environment," something which is prohibited by law in all fifty States of the Union, as far as I know.
That's why Suzanne Lucas' article on Inc.com ("No, Google Should Not Have Fired the 'Anti-Diversity' Engineer") is, I think, fatally and fundamentally flawed.
This is the point where I point out that I'm not a lawyer, and acknowledge that U.S. law is... messy. Laws are often State-level things in the U.S., meaning that approaches can vary wildly depending on which of the fifty States you happen to live or work in; there are also federal laws on the books protecting employees' right to discuss working conditions, and protecting whistle-blowers (employees who reveal corporate or institutional wrongdoing to the public). Lucas' article argues that TADE (whose specific identity and history I'm omitting as irrelevant to the point that I'm making here) should have remained in place at Google because parts of the screed (published to all of Google via that company's email system) seemed to qualify as one or the other, thus protecting the whole thing.
The problem with that argument is that TADE wasn't fired for doing either of those things; he was fired for the toxic, misogynistic parts of that ten-page screed, which basically argued that women were all genetically incapable of understanding maths as well as men can, and therefore less qualified than any man for any engineering job for which they might have applied. (HR? Sure. PR? No problem. Programming? Dudes only, please.)
And that is the exactly sort of discriminatory and hostile environment that Google is legally required to do something about. Failing to act on it, i.e. leaving TADE in place, could put Google in far greater legal jeopardy than removing him. Firing him might lead to a single wrongful termination lawsuit from one guy, but keeping him opens them up to sexual harassment and/or discrimination lawsuits from every woman who's ever worked at Google, as well as every woman who's ever been turned down for a job there.
Google's duty to their shareholders is crystal clear, here: TADE had to go.
And that possible wrongful dismissal lawsuit? Sure, TADE will probably be able to find a lawyer who will happily (and even ethically) tell him that he has a case, file the paperwork, and take his money while his lawsuit grinds its way through the courts, but there's a world of difference between having a case, and having a winnable case. TADE's case might well survive Google's first pro forma motion to dismiss, but it really isn't winnable, and Google has every reason to expect that they'll prevail on their case's merits.
Yes, we have no bananas.
People, this is why you don't publish ten pages of misogynistic screed through your company's fucking email system. It doesn't matter that your 4chan, "alt right" politics were briefly in vogue last November. Your huge corporate employer doesn't care, their risk-and-bad-PR-averse shareholders and directors don't care, and the courts don't care either. No, not even in the U.S.
Sure, you can find a lawyer who'll take your money while losing your lawsuit; that lawsuit might even be superficially viable enough to avoid being tossed as frivolous; but you're still going to lose both your job and your lawsuit, and Google can afford those legal fees a lot better than you can. And it needs to be said that the United States is a permissive outlier here, one of the few functioning democracies where fundamental topics like the details of free speech limitations, and the balance between the rights of the members of society's majority and those of their (historically systemically disadvantaged) minorities, is largely left to a byzantine tangle of State-level laws, only rarely rising to the Supreme Court for a ruling that can apply nation-wide. In most democracies, the need of those societies to protect their more vulnerable and marginalized members is enshrined in law at a national level. Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, provides more than enough legal wiggle room for there to be laws against hate speech; Germany restricts the use of certain symbols and expressions of ideology (for excellent historical reasons, I might add); and so on.
This is why it makes me slightly crazy to see people wasting their time "debating" whether or not TADE had valid points to make, or whether his firing is some sort of SJW agenda run amok, or whether laws against creating workplaces that are overtly hostile towards women and visible minorities are still debatable in, really, any sense at all. To the best of my knowledge, these are all matters of settled law. There might be controversy, and publicity (good and bad) to be mined here, but there's really no question that Google did the only thing that they reasonably could do, given the circumstances.
No, I'm not going to go there.
I'm not going to get into a deep and detailed discussion of States Rights issues in U.S. politics, and their long history of association with bigotry, systemic discrimination, the KKK, and the
I'm not going to get into a deep discussion of gender-based discrimination in STEM fields, either. There is plenty of material available online about this topic, too, and again, many of the people writing about it on the regular are doing a better job than I ever will. If you want a more personal perspective, try this op-ed from YouTube's Susan Wojcicki, or this piece from CNBC, or this piece from former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger.
I'm also not going quote TADE's screed in any detail. It's Gamergate all over again; a lot of what he had to say was repellent, and what nuggets of valid insight he might have included are buried under so much shit that I have no intention of digging for them. Neither am I planning to get into any of the pseudo-"science" that he cites as justification for his retrograde views; that stuff has all been extensively studied, and thoroughly debunked, for decades; the last time it was considered to have any scientific validity at all was when it was embraced by a group of pre-WWII eugenics enthusiasts that you might have heard of.
(No, I'm not going to name-check them; I've made it this far without overly "breaking" Godwin's Law, and don't intend to fuck it up, this close to the finish.)
Finally, I'm not going to get into the topic Julian Assange, and his latest desperate attempt to remain relevant, in any significant detail. Julian Assange has a well-established propensity for getting down into the muck with whoever gives him an opportunity to take a shot at someone he's holding a grudge against, and Google would appear to be on his shit list. As far as I'm concerned, though, anyone who's willing to knowingly publish information-free, illegally-obtained "news" on behalf of Putin's Russia is already so far beyond the pale as to be unworthy of further serious consideration. Assange is irrelevant, and (IMHO) the organization he founded will never again have any credibility unless and until they disavow their founder-gone-rogue.
(Besides, it's not like we need a Wikileaks to tell us what the current U.S. administration is up to, these days. During the dark days of the Bush administration, who classified anything that might cause embarrassment, while deliberately leaking tidbits of classified information that they wanted to use as Sunday talk show talking points, Wikileaks actually served a purpose. President Trump won't stop talking, though, no matter how much it hurts him, and his White House leaks like a sieve. Wikileaks is no longer required.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programme.
(Okay, I lied, it's not quite all.)
I want to quote from Part (3) of Yonathan Zunger's essay:
Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.
If you hadn’t written this manifesto, then maybe we’d be having a conversation about the skills you need to learn to not be blocked in your career — which are precisely the ones you described as “female skills.” But we are having a totally different conversation now. It doesn’t matter how good you are at writing code; there are plenty of other people who can do that. The negative impact on your colleagues you have created by your actions outweighs that tremendously.
You talked about a need for discussion about ideas; you need to learn the difference between “I think we should adopt Go as our primary language” and “I think one-third of my colleagues are either biologically unsuited to do their jobs, or if not are exceptions and should be suspected of such until they can prove otherwise to each and every person’s satisfaction.” Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.
If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come. But our company is committed to maintaining a good environment for all of its people, and if one person is determined to thwart that, the solution is pretty clear.
I’m writing this here, in this message, because I’m no longer at the company and can say this sort of thing openly. But I want to make it very clear: if you were in my reporting chain, all of part (3) would have been replaced with a short “this is not acceptable” and maybe that last paragraph above. You would have heard part (3) in a much smaller meeting, including you, me, your manager, your HRBP, and someone from legal. And it would have ended with you being escorted from the building by security and told that your personal items will be mailed to you. And the fact that you think this was “all in the name of open discussion,” and don’t realize any of these deeper consequences, makes this worse, not better.
The rest of the piece is equally excellent; you should definitely go read the whole thing.