It is not politics to avoid talking about politics and religion. Stop imposing your personal view onto others and leave people alone. Work is work. Most of us work for the check and try to work on cool projects and keep the politics and religion for private discourse with people at home or at the pub.
This is coercion and it does the exact opposite of convincing others. Making people understand one's politics is surefire way to get the opposite result.
Also, if someone does that to me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Fuck off". Unapologetically.
Not talking about politics specifically at work (which is the scope they were addressing of which is pretty concretely indicated two sentences later with "work is work") does not mean they never talk about politics at other times in their life.
Also not talking about politics doesn't mean not engaging with politics at all. One could still be listening, thinking and voting which means not simply embracing the status quo despite not talking about it readily.
Nope. Keep your religion to yourself please and thank you. Define it however you want, but most people see through the bs strong arm tactic to try to force people to engage in this shit, and don’t want it.
Hopefully the tech layoffs are from the activist types so the rest of us can just focus on the code and design in peace and quiet. So far everywhere I worked in SV the activists were vocal but unliked by the majority. And they were also the least productive employees by far.
Activists are usually the least productive because they have more than one dish they’re cooking.
But they’re also like a group dedicated to “saving the spotted skylark” once they save the skylark, their mission is complete. Do they disband? Of course not!!! Let’s find a new cause, the threatened fire ant!
Too many dollars are chasing too few goods because of supply chain issues caused by these governments locking everyone down when they overreacted. You can't reduce inflation this way except by affecting tens of millions of innocent people who now have austerity measures imposed on them from on high courtesy of Janet Yellen and her posse.
They should have avoided the steep lockdowns and given cash directly to households instead of the giant infusion/bailout to failing states and companies that didn't even need the money.
Most progressives end up changing their tune on all their major ideas when they collide with reality. For example, San Francisco last night booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA because of the increasing crime rate. Seattle recently saw increases in crime and had to walk back their tune on getting rid of law enforcement. Progressive ideas simply do not work in reality. Be it on law enforcement, dissolution of borders, dissolution of merit-based systems, equity as pertains to gifted programs...I've not seen a single progressive idea produce any good results when implemented.
I'm hoping the SF DA recall election is a sign that we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction as more people realize that the progressive platform is toxic trash.
It still is the vanguard of all those things, fortunately. The good news is that it seems the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. For example, last night San Franciso booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA. This mirrors a trend in other progressive bases too. The mid-term elections will at this rate represent a chastising of the progressive left. Good riddance!
> "but for the majority of people who are of age to be posting here, if they were in a gifted program, it likely is because they had parents who helped them study for the tests to get in by spending money."
Source? It's certainly not the case for me individually, having been an immigrant child who got through on my own since my parents didn't know enough English to help me on homework and we were too poor to afford tutoring.
We were doing that for most of the 90s and early 2000s and it was working. It's only because of grifters and agitators and "thought leaders" who try to make a buck off of divisions and needless debates that we see this resurgence in these types of politics. And underneath the veneer of race concern-trolling there's a resurgence in communist ideas trying to use the wedge of race as the basis for justifying both the redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of merit-based systems.
> "Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?"
Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them. Some of them have doubled down on woke-speak around "equity" for so long, that they cannot backtrack and accept that merit and performance exist. Doing this would put them at odds with their current in-group and likely their only source of meaning and "friendship" with anyone.
It's the same crowd of people who just lost their very progressive DA in San Francisco during last night's recall election outcome. They keep doubling down on their policing strategy (see: no policing strategy) and being soft on crime and consequently crime has increased significantly. The same group of people that plugs their ears to reason and reality on why policing is necessary are the same group of people that are always trying to drag everyone down to their same floor level.
> Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them.
There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
By responding with reason in writing as succintly as possible, and restating it as often as possible, and being unafraid to restate it when they respond with empty dogma.
And in the workplace, by gutting the types of roles that are just about being "thought leaders" in this direction. Technical people are afraid of those thought leaders because they don't want to get in trouble or fired for speaking against the cult. It's understandable since people need to get paid so they can provide for their families. But if companies just start dropping the negative weight that just encumbers everything and doesn't contribute code or design, it'll improve the bottom line and also gradually resolve this problem in the corporate workplace. The silver lining of a tech correction is that it may actually help make this decision more simple since companies can just start shedding the weight that is not actively making the product better.
So fire them, stop filling those types of roles, recall them in recall elections like San Francisco did last night with that terrible DA, vote in general, and let's stop associating with toxic people. It's effective if enough people do it.
> There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
If someone were to not have read the above comments, this argument could be very easily used to support the opposing (political) stance as well. I suppose most humans are just emotion driven - though this need not be a bug.
First, recognize that "reason" is somewhat narrower than we'd like to believe. Our own reasoning is applied when convenient and suppressed when convenient. And many times there is simply too much complexity and you must rely on wisdom instead.
The reason that "reason" often wins is because it often works. Of course, sometimes it either doesn't work, or takes a long time to work, and we can conveniently ignore it. Eventually reality catches up, but not always in a way that illustrates the cause.
The best way to make reason work is to expose people making decisions to reality, such that they benefit or lose based on the quality of their reasoning. The most unreasonable people will all of a sudden become very reasonable.
Alternatively stated, prevent people from hiding from reality. There are many places to hide, and these are often the most unreasonable places. National politics is one: your ideas probably won't happen (even if you're in Congress), and if they do, and something bad happens, there are enough other factors to make it easy to blame something else. Academia is another such place. So is extended adolescence.
For all the flaws in reasoning that are being highlighted in this thread, progressive have very clear and concrete goals: Equity, removing discrimination, improving opportunities, raising the floor for the social safety net, closing the wealth gap, improving housing affordability, etc.
You may disagree with their methods and have criticisms. That is valid. But are you opposed to their goals or their means?
Do you have alternative goals?
I ask you because most of the internet and media that criticizes "woke ideology" does not seem to have it's own perspective. I genuinely need to understand what is the alternative that people are proposing. Because certainly "Things were just fine before we started talking about racism, and the world was already a meritocracy that we shouldn't try to fix" doesn't resonate with me either.
Many on this site complain about Woke SJWs and all their focus on ideology, but what do people seek here instead? Just pure free market libertarianism?
You don't make progress. Unless you're in a position to gain power, what you do is you have six to ten children, raise them on the homestead, and hope that in a few generations they can begin to fix some things. That, or violent revolt, but revolt is a bit harder
Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)
I'm totally ok with believing statistics that don't match my worldview. I've even adjusted my worldview because of some statistics I've seen but my understanding is that those statistics are flawed. A very important part of statistics is understanding how they're gathered and these are usually gathered from crimes reported to police. From what I've heard people haven given up reporting most crimes there.
If you're going to blindly believe statistics without trying to interpret them then what about the ones showing the outsized homicide rate for Black people? Without interpretation all you can conclude from that is something extremely racist.
