American Elephants

People who run big companies are only human, like the rest of us. Some are not as bright as they think they are, they are subject to fashion and fads, and very much influenced by what other companies are doing—because they might know something that their own company does not. It’s not easy running a big company, that’s why they make big salaries, and why the Democrats always want to raise their taxes.

One of the very BIG words floating around in our society at present is “Diversity.” An organization must be diverse or they will be accused of being racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-another underrepresented minority or another of those words, and held up to censure, ridicule, bad publicity or even attacks from the more enlightened. Womyn are particularly interested in diversity, as they know that all women are paid 9% less than men for doing the same job, even though equal pay has been the law since 1963. Group pictures will be scanned for the correct mixture of skin colors and ethnicity. It is a very big deal, and utterly meaningless.

James Damore, a software engineer at Google, was attempting to help to alleviate the problem, which Google apparently considers to be a very major problem indeed.  J. Christian Adams wrote about Mr. Damore and his lawsuit against Google at PJ Media.

I met James Damore at a conference last November after he received an award for speaking out against Google’s race obsession and cultish orthodoxy. The poor fellow seemed bewildered, still stuck in those good old-fashioned American notions of free speech, tolerance, and color-blindness toward other people. Damore didn’t seem to understand the Left has big plans for America. His experience at Google should make clear to every American that this gang is playing for keeps.

This article cannot possibly capture all of the rancid, racialist, thuggish things going on at Google, so I’d urge you to take time to read the whole complaint. It’s like reading Solzhenitsyn’s travel log from Ekibastuze. It reveals nothing short of the psychologies of totalitarianism in their timeless forms. The purges. The moral relativism. The threats. The lists of enemies.  The upside-down world of the wicked justifying their wickedness.

Do read Mr. Adams’ short article, and then follow the above link, to the whole complaint. I read it last night, and had a hard time getting to sleep.

Google is so wrongheaded, so foolish. They have fallen for a racist meme and are criticizing the most valuable thing they might have in their employees which is diversity of ideas. Real advances come about when someone thinks differently, follows up on a moment of inspiration, refuses to accept the standard idea as the standard.  Neither Orville nor Wilbur Wright had a pilot’s license.

Back in 1852, “Joseph Lister was a young house surgeon at London’s University College Hospital. While dealing with an outbreak of gangrene, he noticed that when he cleaned his patients’ ulcers—an unusual practice at the time—they had a much higher incidence of recovery. ”

He kept following up on his unorthodox idea, and learned of Louis Pasteur’s work, and eventually was able to decide that it wasn’t bad air, but “its constituent of microbial life” that was the source of hospital infection. Generations of people are alive today because Joseph Lister pursued his own diversity of thought. You can quickly come up with dozens if not hundreds of advances in our world that came about because someone had the fortitude to think differently, even in the face of taunts and condemnation.

It is, of course, much more comfortable when no one ruffles the feathers of anyone else, goes along to get along, does not rock the foundations. But thinking a little differently is what allows us to advance. It will take a courageous court in Santa Clara County to deal properly with Mr. Damore’s complaint, and conventional thinking would take note of the fact that Google is a very large and prosperous employer in the county. Think differently.