Damore & Wax vs. anti-dialogue leftists

(Damore context.  For the uninitiated, by leftism or left-wing politics I refer to egalitarian and quasi-egalitarian strains of thought, and the further left you go the more deranged and dishonest it gets.)

At the top of the search results for damore manifesto is an article from Wired that contains some well-reasoned pushback against Damore's arguments mixed in with the whiff of bad faith from the authors about the implications.  (From the looks of things what Google did was not even bother with the well-reasoned pushback - i.e., attempt at dialogue - but instead replaced reasoning with the bad faith part.)

I won't get into the specifics of the science that would be involved in a legitimate back-and-forth on this topic.  That isn't the point.  The point is whether "social justice warriors" and their ilk operate in good faith.  (They do not.)

The whiff of bad faith creeps in more and more toward the end of the Wired article.  Here are instances of such:

What he’s advocating is scientism—using undercooked research as coverage for answering oppression with a shrug.

(This is far and away the silliest use of the term scientism as I've seen, although that isn't important here.)  The authors reach this judgment about Damore's advocacy based on the notion that Damore cherry-picked the science to support what are, more or less, political conclusions.  But how would anyone determine that?  What we do know in retrospect is that there is more to the scientific-studies picture than what Damore presented; the question is whether he should have known about the rest of the picture, i.e., whether he might have exercised further care and diligence in his looking at the scientific literature before making his argument.  (Gee, just imagine if we apply that same standard to the anti-Damore crowd and leftists in general, which is more or less the whole point of this; my contention is that today's leftists routinely are blatant offenders in this regard, not that it's a close call where the motivations might merely be called into question.)

In the specific case of Damore he's almost definitely making an effort to get to the bottom of things and not clearly trying to ignore counter-arguments (as evidenced, for instance, by the numerous qualifications he adds to his statements); the best case that Google and its defenders might come up with is that Damore's intellectual character is faulty enough that he merits his punishment.  But, really, the only way to determine that is to have a dialogue to test Damore's commitments - which Google (in this case) and tons of leftists refuse to have, which reflects poorly on their intellectual character.

More from the Wired piece, where it gets more egregious:

Damore’s dissent, stripped of its shaky scientism [sic], isn’t a serious conversation about human difference. It’s an attempt to make permanent a power dynamic that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If Google was, for Damore, an echo chamber, that’s because his was the only voice he was really willing to hear.

Fucking horseshit!  That's the authors jumping to a conclusion not warranted by anything that came before that.  (Can it be thrown back in the authors' faces, pray tell?  They obviously didn't do their homework before throwing the term "scientism" around like fools, so are we entitled to the sweeping conclusion that they're intellectually lazy and full of hubris?)

I've pointed to the essential problem above, but to reformulate: The authors preceded their closing cheap shot with reasoned pushback.  But that's not what Google did.  It didn't offer reasoned pushback.  It implicitly adopted sloppy caricatures of Damore's point to get to the conclusion that it and the left-activists in the company wanted about his attitudes toward women in his workplace.  Or, put differently, it adopted the same mean-spirited conclusions as these authors without even so much as reasoned pushback, which makes it doubly offensive.

==

The same dynamic was in play with the disgraceful Amy Wax episode (not disgraceful on her part, to be clear).  To recap: Prof. Wax presented an argument about how (among other things) the black-white achievement gap could be closed in great part if the black demographic as a whole did a better job of adopting what she called 'bourgeois values,' among which are things like intact nuclear families which might be expected to help better promote a more solid work ethic, avoid criminal behaviors, that sort of thing.  This resulted in an uproar at her (Ivy League) campus from a mob of students and faculty who virtue-signalled by signing statements (devoid of substantive arguments but long on conclusive claims and "social justice" buzzwords) to the effect of, "These are the views we've determined you hold, and we thereby condemn you, end of story."  There wasn't anything remotely resembling a reasoned dialogue.  One example of the blatant dishonesty is when some of these dickheads turned Wax's appeal to a return to "1950s values" into an appeal for a return to "pre-Civil-Rights" values.  (Compare to the dickheads such as Scumbag Kamala Harris who do the same with Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.)

It's by no means a stretch to believe that if an Ivy League school is pulling this kind of shit, then (given the ideas-networks necessarily involved) this dynamic is pervasive throughout academia.  (Compare the 2000s episode where Harvard's then-president Larry Summers dared to suggest that sex differences might explain the male-female imbalance in STEM professions.  The very topic is off-limits, precluding dialogue and coercing agreement, i.e., without the autonomous cognitive processing and weighing required for objectivity as opposed to intrinsicim.  [Is there anything more ugly, dangerous, and anti-intellectual about the dynamic in question than this?])

Now, after that dishonest uproar/condemnation, the ever-honorable Heterodox Academy hosted an actual substantive discussion about Wax's argument, including this lengthy article by John Gelbach.  The likes of the Gelbach article is what the screaming University of Pennsylvania leftists should have put forth (along with allowing Wax a response - heck, why not bend over backwards in this regard just to be sure) before they reached their definitive determinations.  But they already showed their malicious hand.

Now, my question: in what relevant respects do the anti-Damore and anti-Wax reactions differ, given that reasoned pushback was quite evidently available to be had?  If they don't really differ in essentials, then my suggestion that a similar dynamic is in play in both cases holds up.  (I don't see any relevant or essential difference between these two episodes in that regard.  The only really interesting difference is that tenure protected Wax from firing, else I believe it would have gotten uglier.)

Now, what if I told you that the same essential dynamic is in play in the way the American left portrays Trump as a racist?  Surely if it is, there should be plenty of overwhelming evidence of the dynamic in play.  Since you're either clued in or basically clueless there, I won't bother elaborating in this here post and will leave the rest as an exercise for readers with pointers to this blog's "trump," "race," and leftism-related tags (for which see below).

In sum: the prevailing dynamic of contemporary leftism involves sloppy constructions of opponents' positions - usually in the worst possible light, usually without respect for nuance - followed by no dialogue/dialectic but rather declarations of condemnation.  (The blatantly dishonest dynamic is also at work at various major media outlets.)  And that's why they are, as Noonan points out, the most hated group in America today, and perhaps the most dangerous.

[Addendum: Just to dredge it up yet again as yet another example of the blatantly dishonest dynamic in question, the left's reckless smearing of Brett Kavanaugh - its one-sided presentation of his accusers' stories as the full story (even Swetnick's obvious lies in some (prominent) instances, if you can fucking believe it) and in its utter disregard of the rebuttals from the other side.  So when I bring up how dangerous these deranged dishonest people are, just imagine if they had the run of the place and what would happen to the likes of Kavanaugh then.  The parallels with the Title IX campus kangaroo court procedures are clear.]