[“There are some in the Valley, such as notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.”
Needless to say, Antonio never wrote anything like that]
I was with you up until the last couple sentences.
No, Matt. These people are true believers. They seriously believe that speech is violence and opposing ideas are an existential threat. They genuinely do think that witches will float. That they're saving the world by extracting confessions from heretics. And most importantly of all, that doing all this means they're on The Right Side of History™, the modern version of Divine Right.
It's all the darkest elements of religion, stripped of difficult concepts like forgiveness and mercy. After all, the science-priests and media-priests have already declared them righteous, and those who oppose them are heathens. Self-reflection would just get in the way.
I'm not saying that NONE of them are self-serving cynics. But those aren't the ones I'm worried about. I'm sure we're all familiar with CS Lewis and his (overplayed but basically correct) observation about tyrants who oppress people for their own good, but for those who aren't, here it is.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
"Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!"
Too bad more writers aren't this acerbically funny anymore.
I find it quite hilarious that apparently none of the genius letter signatories, many of whom I'm assuming are women, realize that if you're the type to read a passage like this in a book and actually sign a letter calling for the author to be fired or, as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit." Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on? As Matt points out this is false outrage, but if even one person is truly threatened by this they need to be pointed gently towards mental health resources because you're not living in reality anymore. This is a perfect is example of what Christina Hoff-Sommers calls "fainting couch feminism". It should be an embarrassment to all women. This episode is kinda proving actual misogynists right, and that infuriates me.
Yeah, this happened to me in academia. Probably just after it happened to Matt? The public ones that we know about are just the tip. (Just the tip. Sounds like the kind of eXile juvenalia that got Matt into trouble.)
In my case, I wrote a department-wide e-mail that suggested my tenured colleagues were hypocritcal for pretending to be Marxists while taking summer sessional work from extremely vulnerable and underpaid sessional professors who received no salary--zero dollars--over the four summer months. Three of my colleagues filed formal complaints against me under the college's "bullying & harrassment act" which had been hastily enacted earlier that year in a response to MeTooMania. A college-hired arbitrator found, over three months of closed-door testimony involving all members of my department,(secret testimony--a Freedom of Information requested produced hundreds of redacted pages), that because allegations of hypocrisy, however they are made, are known to cause humiliation, and because under the new bullying & harrassment act" anything anyone does to anyone else that causes that person to feel, subjectively, that they have been bullied or harrassed means that they have been bullied or harrassed, my publicly circulated e-mail was deemed harrassment. More hilariously, a third complainant--in no way referenced in my e-mail but a recipient to the thread to which I responded--was deemed to have been a witness to bullying & harrassment, which the arbitrator decided was the same thing as having been subjected to it directly.
Wrote this mostly to say that if they haven't come for you, it's probably just a matter of time--mostly I feel, because they've found out that they can. At will. On a whim. For anything. For sport. For revenge. Because they're bored. Because there no longer appears to be forces sufficient to stop them. Seems to me they're just getting going.
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference if I stated that, as an old, white, crippled woman who watched the Professional Class white women launch the neo-feminism that has led to any criticism of someone with a vagina now automatically being labeled "misogyny", including other women, I totally agree with Antonio about the ability of most Professional Class women to survive any real collapse of civilization. The fact so many are ardently vegan on the grounds killing animals for food is a crime equivalent to mass murder will likely starve to death is a case in point.
Granted, men take the same position, but when I'm attacked for daring to even suggest not everyone is metabolically capable of ceasing to be an omnivore, it's almost always by women who haughtily inform me I'm worse than Ted Bundy for daring to continue eating bacon.
On a more serious note, you know what this reminds me of? The Terror during the French Revolution. Have a neighbor you dislike? Report her as having spoken favorably of the nobility. Off with her head! Even though the blood being shed is symbolic, is it not the same mindset—a demand everyone adhere with absolute purity to whatever the mob dictates is acceptable?
I would add that the employe letter signers at Apple, or NYT or WSJ and etc. share a psychological profile of a petty neurotic desperately seeking an antidote for that ever so painful dead ender realization of inferiority and impotent inner rage combined with being just plain old fashion bad person. They volunteered for juries during French revolution, joined the mobs during witch hunts, went from B and C students to leaders of cultural revolution in China, and while over their heads Ivy leagues get professors and deans fired. Today after that brief moment of faux power they disappear in history as the newspaper staffer that can badly afford to live in a Brooklyn walkup or a prisoner of a cubicle staring at a monitor patrolling clickbait analytics 10 hours per day and with joining another twitter mob being the highlight of their miserable unhappy existence. The most pathetic and dangerous forms of humanity.
I know someone who was canceled before canceling was packaged as necessary for "safety" or "justice." They cancelers were a pack of envious, spiteful jackals animated by resentment of a top performer who was also as generous as she was naive. Afterwards, they would slink around the office in a state of semi-shame. Today they would be openly proud.
Had "Antonia" Garcia-Martinez written this alternative passage she'd be lauded:
"Most *men* in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement chauvinism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."
A great intensity to this piece. "They’re just ordinary greedy Americans trying to get ahead, using the tactics available to them, and it’s time to stop thinking of stories like this through any other lens."
JBP has said women channel their urge for violence through gossip, innuendo, and character assassination. He's not wrong. And since men channel their urge for violence through violence -- which is frowned on in the workplace -- there's some, uh, inequity, going on right now.
I was encouraged by the comments. I posted a remark defending James Damore, then did a quick search to see if any earlier commenters had done the same. Oh, yeah. Plenty.
Thank you for a perfect assessment of most of the Silicon Valley. A few years ago when we decided to leave, after a quarter century, a mother at my son's school was stunned. Why would anyone ever want to leave? When I mentioned the ever increasing homelessness and poverty that was quickly expanding into areas where it was never before seen, she replied. "I have never really noticed, but I'm so busy, all the time...".
It was as if no one eating a $300 a head dinner, before wine, could be bothered to contemplate the circumstances of the their waiter, who enjoyed a short commute, because he lived in a camper down the street. A friend once had the audacity to show up at a play date with non organic grapes. A successful engineer, she was lectured , that her children should only consume organic, locally sourced produce. When my friend jokingly noted, she hailed from Michigan, and local produce was a bit hard to find there in the winter, the other mother went on about how easy it would be to simply cover the midwest in hot houses, if those in fly over country, would simply care about their kids and the environment.
Much of the population most concerned with global warming, sees no problem with daily grocery and restaurant deliveries, flying private or owning multiple, large homes. It is a level of feudal, hypocrisy nearly unfathomable, for someone who has not personally experienced it. I worry the sanctimony will one day spread throughout the country, before everyone realizes the Emperors have no clothes.
[“There are some in the Valley, such as notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.”
Needless to say, Antonio never wrote anything like that]
Coincidentally enough, neither did Damore
If I ever have the woke mob chasing me w/ axes, Matt Taibbi is the writer I want telling my story. You're a good man, Matt.
I was with you up until the last couple sentences.
No, Matt. These people are true believers. They seriously believe that speech is violence and opposing ideas are an existential threat. They genuinely do think that witches will float. That they're saving the world by extracting confessions from heretics. And most importantly of all, that doing all this means they're on The Right Side of History™, the modern version of Divine Right.
It's all the darkest elements of religion, stripped of difficult concepts like forgiveness and mercy. After all, the science-priests and media-priests have already declared them righteous, and those who oppose them are heathens. Self-reflection would just get in the way.
I'm not saying that NONE of them are self-serving cynics. But those aren't the ones I'm worried about. I'm sure we're all familiar with CS Lewis and his (overplayed but basically correct) observation about tyrants who oppress people for their own good, but for those who aren't, here it is.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
"Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!"
Too bad more writers aren't this acerbically funny anymore.
I find it quite hilarious that apparently none of the genius letter signatories, many of whom I'm assuming are women, realize that if you're the type to read a passage like this in a book and actually sign a letter calling for the author to be fired or, as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit." Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on? As Matt points out this is false outrage, but if even one person is truly threatened by this they need to be pointed gently towards mental health resources because you're not living in reality anymore. This is a perfect is example of what Christina Hoff-Sommers calls "fainting couch feminism". It should be an embarrassment to all women. This episode is kinda proving actual misogynists right, and that infuriates me.
I loved every single bile-drenched word of this fucking piece.
Yeah, this happened to me in academia. Probably just after it happened to Matt? The public ones that we know about are just the tip. (Just the tip. Sounds like the kind of eXile juvenalia that got Matt into trouble.)
In my case, I wrote a department-wide e-mail that suggested my tenured colleagues were hypocritcal for pretending to be Marxists while taking summer sessional work from extremely vulnerable and underpaid sessional professors who received no salary--zero dollars--over the four summer months. Three of my colleagues filed formal complaints against me under the college's "bullying & harrassment act" which had been hastily enacted earlier that year in a response to MeTooMania. A college-hired arbitrator found, over three months of closed-door testimony involving all members of my department,(secret testimony--a Freedom of Information requested produced hundreds of redacted pages), that because allegations of hypocrisy, however they are made, are known to cause humiliation, and because under the new bullying & harrassment act" anything anyone does to anyone else that causes that person to feel, subjectively, that they have been bullied or harrassed means that they have been bullied or harrassed, my publicly circulated e-mail was deemed harrassment. More hilariously, a third complainant--in no way referenced in my e-mail but a recipient to the thread to which I responded--was deemed to have been a witness to bullying & harrassment, which the arbitrator decided was the same thing as having been subjected to it directly.
Wrote this mostly to say that if they haven't come for you, it's probably just a matter of time--mostly I feel, because they've found out that they can. At will. On a whim. For anything. For sport. For revenge. Because they're bored. Because there no longer appears to be forces sufficient to stop them. Seems to me they're just getting going.
Matt may not have intended this to be a panegyric to Antonio, but I can't rush out to buy Chaos Monkeys fast enough.
Streisand effect. Book is out of stock on Amazon. Just picked it up for kindle.
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference if I stated that, as an old, white, crippled woman who watched the Professional Class white women launch the neo-feminism that has led to any criticism of someone with a vagina now automatically being labeled "misogyny", including other women, I totally agree with Antonio about the ability of most Professional Class women to survive any real collapse of civilization. The fact so many are ardently vegan on the grounds killing animals for food is a crime equivalent to mass murder will likely starve to death is a case in point.
Granted, men take the same position, but when I'm attacked for daring to even suggest not everyone is metabolically capable of ceasing to be an omnivore, it's almost always by women who haughtily inform me I'm worse than Ted Bundy for daring to continue eating bacon.
On a more serious note, you know what this reminds me of? The Terror during the French Revolution. Have a neighbor you dislike? Report her as having spoken favorably of the nobility. Off with her head! Even though the blood being shed is symbolic, is it not the same mindset—a demand everyone adhere with absolute purity to whatever the mob dictates is acceptable?
I would add that the employe letter signers at Apple, or NYT or WSJ and etc. share a psychological profile of a petty neurotic desperately seeking an antidote for that ever so painful dead ender realization of inferiority and impotent inner rage combined with being just plain old fashion bad person. They volunteered for juries during French revolution, joined the mobs during witch hunts, went from B and C students to leaders of cultural revolution in China, and while over their heads Ivy leagues get professors and deans fired. Today after that brief moment of faux power they disappear in history as the newspaper staffer that can badly afford to live in a Brooklyn walkup or a prisoner of a cubicle staring at a monitor patrolling clickbait analytics 10 hours per day and with joining another twitter mob being the highlight of their miserable unhappy existence. The most pathetic and dangerous forms of humanity.
I know someone who was canceled before canceling was packaged as necessary for "safety" or "justice." They cancelers were a pack of envious, spiteful jackals animated by resentment of a top performer who was also as generous as she was naive. Afterwards, they would slink around the office in a state of semi-shame. Today they would be openly proud.
Had "Antonia" Garcia-Martinez written this alternative passage she'd be lauded:
"Most *men* in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement chauvinism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."
In the end Antonio set up his own ironic demise.
A great intensity to this piece. "They’re just ordinary greedy Americans trying to get ahead, using the tactics available to them, and it’s time to stop thinking of stories like this through any other lens."
JBP has said women channel their urge for violence through gossip, innuendo, and character assassination. He's not wrong. And since men channel their urge for violence through violence -- which is frowned on in the workplace -- there's some, uh, inequity, going on right now.
I was encouraged by the comments. I posted a remark defending James Damore, then did a quick search to see if any earlier commenters had done the same. Oh, yeah. Plenty.
I know a piece lands well when it both infuriates me and increases my respect for the writer's ability. Probably your best piece yet, Matt.
Thank you for a perfect assessment of most of the Silicon Valley. A few years ago when we decided to leave, after a quarter century, a mother at my son's school was stunned. Why would anyone ever want to leave? When I mentioned the ever increasing homelessness and poverty that was quickly expanding into areas where it was never before seen, she replied. "I have never really noticed, but I'm so busy, all the time...".
It was as if no one eating a $300 a head dinner, before wine, could be bothered to contemplate the circumstances of the their waiter, who enjoyed a short commute, because he lived in a camper down the street. A friend once had the audacity to show up at a play date with non organic grapes. A successful engineer, she was lectured , that her children should only consume organic, locally sourced produce. When my friend jokingly noted, she hailed from Michigan, and local produce was a bit hard to find there in the winter, the other mother went on about how easy it would be to simply cover the midwest in hot houses, if those in fly over country, would simply care about their kids and the environment.
Much of the population most concerned with global warming, sees no problem with daily grocery and restaurant deliveries, flying private or owning multiple, large homes. It is a level of feudal, hypocrisy nearly unfathomable, for someone who has not personally experienced it. I worry the sanctimony will one day spread throughout the country, before everyone realizes the Emperors have no clothes.