Tag: corpocracy

Problem or opportunity?

Allum Bokhari contemplates the corporate culture wars:

From coffee machine manufacturers to social media giants to the NFL, progressive virtue-signalling has infected every inch of global corporate culture. It is now the most dangerous opponent of freedom in the west, threatening both the Trump agenda and freedom of speech. How did it start? How can it end?

This week, the story is coffee machine maker Keurig, which pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show at the prompting of Media Matters, and is now facing a conservative backlash of NFL-size proportions. But it isn’t just one or two companies engaging in virtue-signalling, it’s practically all of them. It’s Pepsi, which panders to antifa in its ads. Its Heineken, which salutes open borders in their adverts. It’s Twitter. It’s Starbucks. It’s KLM airlines. Despite vast differences in their products, services, and consumers, every industry seems to have the same virtue-signallers.

From the moment of Trump’s inauguration, corporations have been engaged in a frantic struggle to block his agenda. White House globalist-in-chief Gary Cohn, along with the now-disbanded CEO council, did everything they could to blunt the President’s trade policies and prevent him from exiting the Paris Climate Agreement. The same CEO council, along with Cohn, sought to pressure Trump with a series of resignations following his response to a combination of racist white nationalist and Antifa violence in Charlottesville.

And that’s corporations playing nice. When their values are threatened by people who do not sit in the Oval Office, they do far more than simply resign. Earlier this year, after being spooked by mainstream news articles claiming YouTube was a cesspit of terrorism and hate speech, corporations promptly yanked their ads from the platform en masse.

Revenues plummeted overnight, and YouTube quickly added stringent new systems that prevent even remotely controversial content from receiving ad revenue. Once, the platform was a place where bold, independent commentators could develop healthy incomes without answering to any old media gatekeeper. Now, even YouTube’s politest fast food reviewer is having trouble keeping his ad revenue, as the platform introduces ever-stricter language codes. One tantrum from corporations was all it took for free speech on one of the web’s most promising platforms to be all but snuffed out.

What this is doing is creating tremendous opportunities as big corporations intentionally cut themselves off from significant portions of their markets. We’re seeing it play out with Marvel/DC right now! This is not something to mourn, complain about, or fight, this is something to exploit.

You know the government is inept

So why trust its advice when it comes to food? Do you really think they’re going to handle such a complicated subject more effectively than basic highway maintenance or the Department of Motor Vehicles?

What lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

Government diet gurus and health charities have long been engaged on a salt reduction crusade, but what has been missing from this noble effort is the awareness that excessive salt is a problem of processed food. High salt is essential to that larger-than-life processed food taste. Without salt, and a sub-set of assorted chemical flavour enhancers, processed foods would be exposed for what they are: products that have lost their natural savour and nutritional integrity. Salt-free cornflakes, for instance, would be well nigh inedible. No one would want to buy them because they would see that they are a heap of nutritional uselessness. But where is the evidence that salt added as normal seasoning to home cooked food constitutes a health risk?

With salt, as with sugar, the public health establishment is too cowardly to take on the powerful processed food companies and their lobbyists by drawing a distinction between home-prepared food cooked from scratch and industrial convenience food.

Eat less, exercise more, and eat more protein and fewer carbs. My father figured that out 25 years ago. Remember, science that is actually reliable is not called science. It is called “engineering”.

Don’t argue with Damore

You’d think a reporter would be aware that he was overmatched when he went to interview the author of the Google manifesto:

During an interview with Business Insider, Damore, who was fired from Google for publishing a viewpoint diversity manifesto, claimed he “was simply trying to fix the culture in many ways. And really help a lot of people who are currently marginalized at Google by pointing out these huge biases that we have in this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,” he continued, adding, “Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s.”
“These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative,” Damore explained. He sparred with Business Insider’s Steve Kovach, who tried to claim that Damore attacked women in his manifesto.
“I was simply talking about the population level distributions. And I specifically call out that we should never treat an individual differently based on this because there’s so much overlap,” stated Damore. “The document was simply trying to address why there may be fewer women in technology than men. And it never said anything about the women at Google being any different than the men at Google.”
This prompted Kovach to reply, “Not at Google. But broadly it made assumptions about women as a general population though, right?”
“It didn’t make assumptions. It stated scientific facts about the population level distribution,” Damore responded.
“OK. I mean, that’s obviously up for debate too,” Kovach claimed, forcing Damore to explain, “Not really. I mean, these are empirical facts.”
“The population level distributions are not up for debate,” he continued. “Those have been documented hundreds of times.”

Clearly Damore did not realize that Mr. Kovach did not like the population level distributions. Therefore, they were an assumption, ergo subjective, consequently wrong. You’d think these SJWs would, sooner or later, get suspicious about the statistical improbability of their being absolutely right every single time.
Of course, if they grasped statistics, they wouldn’t be SJWs blithely refuting empirical facts as one man’s assumptions.

Unintended consequences

This is why it never pays to overreact to what other people are doing. Be patient and observant, and you’ll see that there are usually silver linings and new opportunities that are exposed by every action, however ill-intended:

Earlier this week, internet hosting provider, GoDaddy, announced it had cancelled US neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, for posting an attack on Heather Heyer, the protester who was murdered at the Klan rally in Charlottesville last week. Google and CloudFlare likewise cancelled its registration after the site tried to move its hosting over to their respective services.
But while these hosting services are being congratulated by some – and condemned by others on free-speech grounds – for ensuring that those looking to commit violence have to work slightly harder to get access to their like-minded Nazi communities, those who own the means of transmission – namely Google, Facebook and Twitter – are still preventing the rest of us from accessing information that allows people to make sense of the world around us.
Earlier this month, Google altered its algorithm – allegedly in an attempt to address the ‘fake news’ problem – and in doing so, a broad array of anti-establishment news organisations, whistleblower, civil-rights and anti-war websites were censored from its search listings. But most people were too distracted by the opinions of some low-level engineer on Google’s diversity hiring policies and its intolerance of conservative views in the workplace to take notice.
The data released by WSWS shows that since Google altered its algorithm, Wikileaks experienced a 30% decline in traffic from Google searches. Democracy Now fell by 36%. Truthout dropped by 25%. Its own traffic dropped by 67% percent over the same period. Alternet saw a 63% decline in traffic. Media Matters saw a 36% drop in traffic. Counterpunch.org fell by 21%. The Intercept fell by 19%.
In May, WSWS was ranked 5th in Google searches for the keyword ‘socialism’. Today the WSWS is nowhere to be found in the top 200 searches for the same keyword. In addition, Google blocked every one of WSW’s top 45 search terms.
Aaron Kaufman, director of development at progressive news outlet, Common Dreams said that Google Search as a percentage of total traffic to the Common Dreams website has decreased nearly 50 percent since May.

Of course, this really shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, as I have conclusively demonstrated, if you shoot at Nazis, you’re mostly going to hit leftists.

Google is not the only player in this censorship game. Earlier last year, anti-establishment information services – Renegade Inc included – experienced a 20% drop in traffic to its Facebook pages, after the social-network altered its algorithm, again, allegedly in an attempt to crack down on ‘fake news’.
Perhaps these leftist sites should stop attempting to push Fake News. It’s interesting to note that since this crackdown on Fake News, the traffic here has observably risen. I doubt there is any actual connection, but it is an amusingly timed coincidence.

Choose your enemies wisely

If I were Jeff Bezos, I would consider this a fair warning and hasten to the White House to determine what the God-Emperor requires:

Donald Trump wiped around $5.7bn dollars off the stock market valuation of Amazon in less than two hours on Wednesday, with a tweet attacking the online retail giant for “doing great damage to tax paying retailers”.
Amazon’s shares lost 1.2 per cent of their value in pre-market trading after Mr Trump’s comments.
The President tweeted: “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the US are being hurt – many jobs being lost!”
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!

Now, Amazon has been absolutely great to us. We have not had a single problem with them outside of the one time an SJW employee abused the power of his position, and they handled the situation beautifully. No complaints at all.
But given how Google, Twitter, and PayPal have been behaving, it is important that Amazon not follow their lead into an SJW-converged death spiral.

Economic war

The culture war in the USA goes economic:

A white nationalist was fired from his job after Twitter users began naming and shaming alt-right supporters involved in yesterday’s deadly Charlottesville rally. The rally – which was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘the largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades in the United States’ – attracted thousands from neo-Nazi groups, the Ku Klux Klan and other far-right organizations.
It also culminated in a horrifying alleged attack on a group of antifascist counter-protesters as alleged white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr allegedly drove into a crowd, killing one person and injuring 19 more.
As the reverberations of that deadly assault continued to be felt on Sunday, Twitter user Yes, You’re Racist began naming and shaming those who were photographed waving torches and allying themselves with violent far-right extremists.

Tit-for-tat is now in order. Do you have an employee who supports Black Lives Matter on Twitter? Fire them. Do you have any employees who are SJWs? Fire them. Anyone who puts rainbows on Facebook? Fire them.
If James Damore and Cole White can be fired for their beliefs, so can everyone else. Once a tactic has been legitimized by the Left, don’t hesitate to use it. The Left has made it very clear that peaceful coexistence is no longer possible, so stop trying to coexist with them.
This development isn’t something to fear. Why are they doing this now? Because they are terrified of the gathering momentum and they are desperate to somehow stop it.
Meanwhile, (((Ben Shapiro))) is still lying about the Alt-Right. It is correct to say that it includes white nationalists, but it is blatantly false to claim that it is entirely white nationalists, or that it is a white supremacist philosophy.
The fact that our enemies feel the need to lie about us and misrepresent our views is one of the strongest indicators that our views are convincing and catching on with more and more former conservatives and libertarians and liberals alike.
Meanwhile, GoDaddy signs up for Google’s economic war on everyone to the right of SJW.

We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.

Build your own platforms. This is an imperative.

Mailvox: IT in a converged company

It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right
This is EXACTLY what happened to me!
One HR director in particular was hard-core SJW and good friends with one of my managers so I was stuck.  One of the things she did that still sticks in my mind was an online training/brainwashing course where 1) we HAD to pass it in order to remain employed and we were told that this was because it was the company’s responsibility to demonstrate nondiscrimination in order to meet federal requirements – which was, first of all, bullcrap, and second, a way to shift the responsibility for the nonsense onto the employees. 2) it contained questions such as “Check the boxes next to groups which are discriminated against” and “white men” was an incorrect answer.  You could select it, and it would just make you redo the question over and over until you gave the “right” answer.
I wasn’t familiar at the time with Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” but he totally nailed what was going on: the point wasn’t to make us believe something we didn’t agree with, the point was to make us complicit.
My reaction – which SHOULD have been to quit and find another job, but I wasn’t wise enough yet – was to manipulate my own responsibilities and the work that needed doing such that I could get everything done for the week in a couple hours, then spend the rest of the time goofing off and surfing the net.  Not a good use of time on my part; a worse use of employee resources by the people in charge.  My morale basically went to zero for several years as a result of these sorts of policies, and the value they got out of me correlated.
I’m out of IT now.  I’ve gotten the impression this sort of problem is too widespread for me to want to put up with it.

Diversity in tech

A 5-time IT manager with 26 years of experience explains the reality of diversity in technology

Large Tech Company – Team of 11
Diversity policy that caused me a lot of problems. I didn’t have the proper control over who I could interview and my main problem was finding competent engineers regardless of race or sex. I did end up interviewing a very diverse set of candidates which made the process extra grueling as I wasted time with so many under-qualified diversity candidates.
Some of these diversity interviews were my most memorable for how bad the candidates were. As an example an Indian woman with a very impressive resume and monster SQL background. Only interview I ended after 10 minutes because the candidate asked me what SELECT meant in an example statement I white boarded and asked her to correct. Turns out the recruiting company had rewritten her resume for her and she was just a blatant diversity candidate. I complained to my manager about this as a waste of my time and was reminded my team was all white and with only one female.
I did so many interviews I knew were I waste of my time that I started just trying a few new techniques on the candidates as interview practice for myself. It was such a waste of time for myself and the candidate and I felt bad wasting time but I had no choice. There was no chance I would hire them but HR’s method of forcing diversity just kept tossing bad candidates at me.
I eventually worked around the process by finding my own candidates and secretly pushing them through the screening process. I could have been fired for this but my resource problem was so bad I didn’t have a choice.
For unrelated reasons I left that position. The single female on my team was promoted to take my place, against my recommendation. She was a pretty good engineer but had no experience managing and the team fell apart less then a year after I left. All my former team members all told me it was due to the ruthless micromanagement by my replacement. In my experience, micromanagement is the behavior of a lot of new managers thrust into a job that is too big for them to handle regardless of sex/race. Also, I never filled the SQL dev position but my replacement did hire a different Indian women as the SQL dev. I did hear she was incompetent and fired after 6 months.
I learned from this to always have full hiring control of my team or be doomed to fail.

Contra this, Google’s CEO, Pichai Sundararajan doubled down and claimed Google “really need to have people internally who represent the world in its totality. And yet, the company has yet to implement a policy of aggressively hiring Nazis, Eskimos, Christians, or Mbenga bushmen from Cameroon.

“To the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur, and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that there’s a place for you in this industry, there’s a place for you at Google,” he told the crowd gathered at a company recreation field. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” he said to cheers and applause. “You belong here and we need you.”
Pichai told the audience, which included about 50 contest finalists from seven countries including the U.S., that seeing the girls gave him hope for the future.
“At Google we are very committed to building products for everyone in the world,” Pichai said. “To do that well, we really need to have people internally who represent the world in totality. It’s really important that more women and girls have the opportunity to participate in technology, to learn how to code, create and innovate.”

Both perspectives can’t be correct.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Google’s CEO cancels a scheduled company-wide “townhall meeting” for fear of the public knowing who is doing what there.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has cancelled its much anticipated meeting to talk about gender issues today. The move came after some of its employees expressed concern over online harassment they had begun to receive after their questions and names have been published outside the company on a variety of largely alt-right sites.
“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” wrote Pichai to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”
Pichai was set to address the search giant’s 60,000 employees in 30 minutes in an all-hands meeting about a recent post by recently fired employee James Damore.
Several sites like this one [literally, this one -VD] has been publishing internal discussion posts and giving out information on those employees. In addition, in a move that many Googlers found already disturbing, Damore did his first major interview with alt-right YouTube personality, Stefan Molyneux (ironic, I know, since Google owns the online video giant).

It’s cute they think we’re not going to find out what their internal discussions concern. Google spies on us, we keep an eye on them. Seems fair.
They’ll strike back soon enough. We’re expecting it. My prediction is a “surprise” leak of their critics’ embarrassing emails and URL histories.

Google has feminism

And feminism is cancer. More inside information in Allum Bokhari’s latest Rebels of Google series:

“The worst part isn’t the ‘diversity.’” says Gordon “It’s the “inclusion” – the banner under which they justify dangerous pseudosciences like unconscious bias and microaggressions, and try to make them company policy.”
Ideological conformity at Google, says Gordon, is “far worse” than James Damore’s viewpoint diversity memo indicates.
“Google is run like a religious cult. Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of “training” that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.”
“This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.”
According to Gordon, efforts to terrorize employees over identity politics come from both managers and rank-and-file Googlers.
“The agitation ranges from very subtle (“it’s not OK,” “we cannot stand for this,” “these are shitty opinions”) to quite overt (“this is violently offensive,” “I will not tolerate,” “I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you”).”
“I’ve seen around 20-30 managers agitating this way, each of whom is in charge of anywhere from a few dozen to over a thousand employees. There are some very high-level people who consider the progressive agenda to be more important than the success and mental health of their teams.”
“I can’t categorically say that it goes up to “the very top”. However, as you now already know from James’s unceremoniously quick firing, the top brass are either sympathetic to or afraid of the mob.”