Tag: corpocracy

Imposters at Google

CG has a theory:

Mr. Damore has managed to spark the largest inflammation of Impostor Anxiety in recorded history.
Impostor Anxiety is not Impostor Syndrome as the Syndrome is associated with failure to recognize actual achievements while those suffering from IA are aware of their diminished ability relative to those around them,
They do not suffer from Dunning–Kruger though it may appear so from the outside sometimes. They are knowingly hiding behind a futile “fake it till you make it” facade that can sometimes carry them so long as resources remain flush.
Sufferers will sometimes mask over their Impostor Anxiety by trying to claim that they suffer from Imposter Syndrome. However this is self defeating as it only amplifies their anxiety due to knowing that at least some people around them know their true skill level, even others who also suffer from Impostor Anxiety and see through the charade.

It makes sense. Just as AA beneficiaries know that they do not merit their places at the universities where they find themselves intellectually overmatched, tens of thousands of the more-recent hires at Google are perfectly aware that they would not have been good enough to get a job there just a few years ago.
James Damore has unmasked them for the inferior employees that they are, which is why they are both panicked and furious.

Breitbart is on it.

Yeah, this diversity debacle doesn’t promise to die down anytime soon:

Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.
In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company.
“While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exists inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know: I will never, ever hire hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit of technically excellent or whatever,” declared former employee Adam Fletcher in a post on Google’s internal, staff-only Google+ network: “Internal Plus.” “I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.”
“You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he continued. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

Nothing new to readers here, but Breitbart has considerably more reach than I do. However, Allum Bokhari’s interview with a rebel Googler, “Hal”, is illuminating:

Hal: Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices. The trial is set for November.
Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.
Allum Bokhari: What’s it like to work in such an environment? Do you think it damages employee output?
Hal: A lot of social justice activists essentially spend all day fighting the culture war, and get nothing done. The company has made it a point to hire more people like this. The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second. The companywide “Google Insider” emails used to talk about cool new tech, but now they’re entirely about social justice initiatives. Likewise, the weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings used to focus on tech, but now they’re split about 50/50 between tech and identity politics signaling.
For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralizing, but it is also dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for sharing a dissenting view. Others have had their promotions denied or suffered other forms of deniable retaliation. Most of us just keep our heads down because we can’t afford to lose our jobs.

Google takes a stand

It’s a bold move by Sundararajan. We’ll see how it works out for him. It was inevitable, because SJWs always double down, but the irony of Pichai Sundararajan, a high-caste Tamil Brahmin, firing an employee for expressing his belief in biological inequality, is practically off the charts.

Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that ascribed gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences. James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” in an email to Reuters on Monday. Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

As I observed after reading the Google CEO’s memo, Damore was doomed because Sundararajan had to mollify his insane SJW employee base, which right now is dancing and celebrating its own inevitable demise. Damore will be fine; he’s better off out of the SJW-converged madhouse and has already been offered jobs by Gab’s Andrew Torba and WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. But Google will not be, because this is a clear signal to the key engineers in Search and AdWords that it is Time To Go.
DH, who is one of the Dread Ilk’s expert data guy’s, explains.

All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It’s. All. AdWords.
The money-making core of Google is a tiny speck of its workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it’s that one or two or three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk, or even just do a slightly less great job.
Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness.

In other words, as the AdWords model fails, which is already happening, Google’s massive market cap is going to rapidly decline with it because all of its other businesses have failed to find traction. The company has observably entered the ideological death spiral that is the inevitable result of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence.

Those talented immigrants

No doubt it’s just their unique South Asian set of skills that accounts for this suspicious statistical anomaly.

Infosys, the India-based information technology consulting firm with an office in Plano, is facing yet another reverse discrimination lawsuit asserting that it creates a hostile work environment for workers who are not from India or South Asia.

Erin Green, a former supervisor at Infosys, filed suit this week in the Eastern District of Texas in Sherman, alleging that he and black and white staffers on his team were denied raises and promotions, and that other “non-South Asian” workers were berated by South Asian company officials…. In filing suit, Green joined a list of Infosys job applicants and employees who have filed suit in courts in several U.S. jurisdictions arguing reverse discrimination.

“Infosys maintains [more than 20,000] employees working in the United States,” Green’s suit said. While less than 5 percent of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93 percent to 94 percent of Infosys’s United States workforce “is of the South Asian national origin, (primarily Indian).”

“This disproportionately South Asian and Indian workforce, by race and national origin, is a result of Infosys’s intentional employment discrimination against individuals who are not South Asian, including discrimination in the hiring, promotion, compensation and termination of individuals,” the suit said.

It’s all about identity now. It’s about time whites started playing according to the replacement rules created by the Jews, Italians, and Irish. The days of the old “give it your best shot, Eddie, and may the best man win” have been over since 1965. The USA is no longer an American nation-state, so the only question that matters is “is it good for the whites”.

Or, in this case, Indians.

Realistically, 93 to 94 percent of Infosys’s employees should be repatriated. Because not good for the whites.

They’ve got nothing

Literally nothing. And they know it now too:

The spell worked its magic for three decades. For three decades humanity believed in the blessings that globalization would bring in its wake. It was assumed that in the end everyone involved will benefit when we remove regulations, when corporations become ubiquitous throughout the world, when the banks have lots of money, when tax havens exist, and of course when government stays out of our hair. What prevailed was the primacy of the economy, whether in Herne, New York or Shenyang. It was as simple as that.

But times have changed. Once considered to be the High Temple of market dogma, the mighty financial world was about to collapse ten years ago, before it had to be rescued by – surprise – the rest of us.

What also collapsed was the myth that markets can regulate themselves. Simmering unrest emerged, borne by diffuse fears, half-knowledge and justifiable rejection of what has gone wrong with globalization. It became an opportune time for con men and authoritarians.

We now see a void that cannot be remedied by trying to fix details. What the world needs instead is a new leitmotif, a new guiding concept. We indeed need it before populists of all stripes fill this void by inciting people against each other. Time is of the essence….

The greatest promise has remained unfulfilled: Half of the Americans today have seen stagnating or even significantly lower real incomes since 1989. In Germany, there are 40 percent who are less well-off in real terms, and half of Germans possess practically no wealth. And nearly one in four Germans works for little pay. Such enormous wealth gaps between the rich and the poor existed in the nineteenth century as well.

Depending on the calculation, progress has thus by-passed a third to half of the population. The Americans and Britons were the first to be jolted by this development through the election victories of Trump and Brexit. Ironically it is those very countries who most eagerly followed the mantra of the free markets that are now confronted with Industry 0.0 and social division. Meanwhile, IMF experts are having to concede that capital markets are probably not so efficient after all. And the once orthodox-liberal OECD is only defining growth these days as good growth if it benefits the poor.

The myth of the past has become passé. What is missing is the new, powerful concept…. What we need to find is a unifying formula to define the new paradigm: the leitmotif.

Finding it is a tremendous challenge. It cannot be as simple as the market-works-wonders formula. Yet it must be simple enough to make it plausible to everyone. The solution probably lies somewhere in the middle: in a better controlled, enlightened globalization that can do without the compulsion to standardize everything throughout the world. What is needed is a new balance of liberties with built-in safeguards against excesses. And an environment in which politicians can again shape and decide on policies instead of rescuing banks or states without having much choice in the matter.

The great irony is that the author quite clearly doesn’t realize that “the myth of the past” was a con all along, and what he’s begging for is a new and improved con from the same set of con artists.

You must not think disapproved thoughts

The Denver Post fires the four-time Colorado sportswriter of the year for a single tweet:

The Denver Post has parted ways with writer Terry Frei after he shared an insensitive tweet following Sunday’s Indy 500 win by Takuma Sato. Sato became the first Japanese-born driver to win the Indianapolis 500 race.

“I am very uncomfortable with a Japanese driver winning the Indianapolis 500 during Memorial Day weekend,” Frei wrote before deleting the tweet.

The Denver Post issued the following statement:

“We apologize for the disrespectful and unacceptable tweet that was sent by one of our reporters. Terry Frei is no longer an employee of The Denver Post. It’s our policy not to comment further on personnel issues. The tweet doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for. We hope you will accept our profound apologies.”

Frei apologized in his own separate statement:

“I fouled up,” Frei wrote. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said when I said it. I should have known better and I regret it. I in no way meant to represent my employer and I apologize to The Denver Post.”

“I made a stupid reference, during an emotional weekend, to one of the nations that we fought in World War II,” he added.

His real mistake wasn’t apologizing – he was doomed anyhow – but in thinking that most Americans even remember who their ancestors fought in WWII, much less care. And remember, there are 85 million or so new post-1965 Paper Americans who don’t give a damn about WWII. If anything, their grandparents and great-grandparents were on the other side. It’s not only ancient history to them, but someone else’s ancient history.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Britain’s Got Talent spares a lad for his “sexist and racist” tweets because he is only 16, but gives him a severe warning:

A source told The Sun: ‘Producers were not happy when they saw he had posted such an inflammatory picture on his Twitter as well as a host of disparaging comments about women.

‘It’s not only a huge embarrassment for Ali, it’s a massive embarrassment for the show too, but producers decided on this occasion to give him the benefit of the doubt and leave him with a warning because he’s only 16. But they will not tolerate contestants using this kind of language as above all BGT celebrates diversity.’

What I would like to see is people start getting fired for publicly expressing views approving of diversity and equality, or other aspects of social justice. I suspect there are already more than a few SJWs not getting hired for that reason, but the Left won’t drop this tactic until right-wing executives respond in kind.

The point is, if you can legitimately be fired for expressing one point of view, you can certainly be fired for expressing the opposite perspective.

The triumph of oligarchy

Michael Lind has an intriguing and deeply historical article on what he calls the New Class War in the American Affairs Journal.

If I am correct, the post–Cold War period has come to a close, and the industrial democracies of North America and Europe have entered a new and turbulent era. The managerial class has destroyed the social settlements that constrained it temporarily in the second half of the twentieth century and created a new kind of politics, largely insulated from popular participation and electoral democracy, based on large donors and shifting coalitions within a highly homogeneous coalition of allied Western elites. Following two decades of increasing consolidation of the power of the managerial class, the populist and nationalist wave on both sides of the Atlantic is a predictable rebellion by working-class outsiders against managerial-class insiders and their domestic allies, who are often recruited from native minorities or immigrant diasporas.

Will the result of the contemporary class war among managers and workers on both sides of the Atlantic be a revival of fascism? In some countries in Europe, populist nationalist parties have emerged from tiny fringe fascist parties, or have attracted their supporters. But talk about Weimar America or Weimar Europe is based on a misunderstanding of history, which blames fascism on populism. In reality, despite their populist trappings, most interwar fascist movements were favored by military and economic elites as a way to block social democracy and communism.

It is not the Weimar republic but the banana republic that provides the most likely negative model. In many Latin American countries, politics has traditionally pitted oligarchs versus populists. A similar pattern existed in many Southern states in the United States between the Civil War and the civil rights revolution.

When populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. How could they lose? They may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege.

In the American South, most populist politicians gave up or sold out. In some cases, like that of Texas governor and senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a country music singer, they were simply folksy fronts for corporate and upper-class interests all along. The few populists who maintained some independence were those who could finance themselves, usually by corrupt means. Louisiana governor Huey Long could battle the ruling families and the powerful corporations because he skimmed money from state employee checks and kept it in a locked “deduct box.” In Texas, anti-Klan populist governor James “Pa” Ferguson, along with his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was elected governor after her husband was impeached on the slogan “Two Governors for the price of one,” sold pardons to the relatives of convicted criminals. As billionaires who could finance their own campaigns, Ross Perot and Donald Trump could claim, with some justification, to be free to run against the national establishment.

Those who believe in liberal democracy can look on this kind of political order only with dismay. Most of the time, coteries within a nepotistic elite run things for the benefit of their class. Now and then, a charismatic populist arises, only to fail, sell out to the establishment, or establish a personal or dynastic political-economic racket. Formal democracy may survive, but its spirit has fled. No matter who wins, the insiders or outsiders, the majority will lose.

This is broadly in line with my own expectations, but it tends to contradict anacyclosis and the Ciceronian political cycle, which sees tyranny following democracy rather than aristocracy. Of course, an elite that has learned the importance of keeping its head down may have had the wherewithal to simply skip that aspect of the cycle in favor of the amorphous vampire squid ink of the corpocracy and rule by artificial  judicial persons, each of whom can support thousands of oligarchic insiders like a legal form of Lovecraft’s Nyarlatothep.

The section on Hobson’s predictions is almost alarming in its prophetic accuracy. It’s long, but definitely read the whole thing. I’ve seen what I personally call “the pirate class” in operation myself, descending upon every promising young corporation and seeking to either drain it dry or personally profit by offering it up as a sacrifice to a larger entity.

Failure at Fox News

As a general rule, when your management decisions are being met by the news that your competitors “smell blood in the water” and “are moving to take advantage”, you should probably rethink your overall strategy:

The profitable, influential, seemingly impregnable Fox News is suddenly vulnerable.

In a massive disruption for right-wing media, Fox talent is on the market, the purge of the old-boy clique may continue, and there’s huge internal paranoia about further lawsuits and revelations.

On top of that, there are episodic pushes from the next generation of Murdoch leadership for changes in culture and personality.

So at a time when all of cable is vulnerable as viewer habits change, Fox is caught between the America-first instincts of its base viewers, and the globalist impulses for Rupert Murdoch’s sons.

A woman to run Fox News? The Hollywood Reporter reports that James and Lachlan Murdoch have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News to replace Bill Shine, the Roger Ailes consigliere.

“[T]he preference … is that the new leader be female.”

And competitors are moving to take advantage.

Perhaps they could hire Marissa Mayer. I understand she is available these days.

Never too big

Bill O’Reilly is just the latest to learn that no matter how big you are, SJWs in the media and the corpocracy can take you down if you give them half a chance.

The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end. According to sources briefed on the discussions, network executives are preparing to announce O’Reilly’s departure before he returns from an Italian vacation on April 24…. The Murdochs’ decision to dump O’Reilly shocked many Fox News staffers I’ve spoken to in recent days. Late last week, the feeling inside the company was that Rupert Murdoch would prevail over his son James, who lobbied to jettison the embattled host. It’s still unclear exactly how the tide turned. According to one source, Lachlan Murdoch’s wife helped convince her husband that O’Reilly needed to go, which moved Lachlan into James’s corner.

I’m not a fan of O’Reilly. My book Media Whores was killed by the publisher and I was paid not to write it after Fox News learned that O’Reilly was one of the subjects to whom a chapter was devoted. But the point is that no one is bigger on cable news than he is, and yet a few allegations were enough to bring him down despite his continuing popularity.

This is why you MUST build your own platform. It’s a non-negotiable.