The site isn't "cancelled" though. Google has chosen not to do business with another business because advertisers that pay Google don't want their ads to appear on ZeroHedge, whose comments section features language that said advertisers don't want associated with their brand. ZeroHedge still exists, is still listed in Google's search results, and can still make money -- just not on Google's ad network. This is the free market at work.
I don’t buy that. I’m not going to cry over Google not doing business with someone, but let’s call a spade a spade: this was a partisan choice. Google’s entire business schtick is that advertisers can use Google’s ad platform to target who they do and do not want to serve ads to. If advertisers really don’t want their ads to show up next to a site’s content, it won’t. Ironically the only people that would see the ad are the people that actually go to the website, so presumably they want to be on that site, and presumably advertisers would like to be where their audience is, wherever they are, unless they themselves are worried about getting “cancelled”.
EDIT: Forgot the other half of the point.
It doesn’t matter if Google makes partisan choices, it’s a free market, and we’ve got choices in life. It does matter when a company makes partisan choices and tries to pass themselves off as objective. Are you objective or do you have a bias? It’s a simple question: we all have biases, they do affect our choices, so be upfront with them rather than passing yourself off as something you’re not.
It feels to me like the word 'partisan' is doing a lot of work in your argument. What if we replaced it with 'ethical'? Google's policy says they will not run ads against certain types of content that they find abhorrent (this is apparently enforced at the site level). Sure, enforcement of those standards is inevitably somewhat subjective, but, so what?
Calling those standards 'biased' or 'partisan' implies that Google's business practices are somehow unfair, or targeted at a particular group. But I don't see the evidence for that here. Just having ethical standards for who you will do business with is not in itself a bad thing!
How can't you foresee the argument people (me, in this case) are going to immediately throw back at yours : "so a company can find it unethical to do business with X, Y or Z, right?".
And then you will go to the legality argument: "no , because that would be against the law".
So why not give that argument directly? Because it's less noble.
Partisanship and ethics are not mutually exclusive. Not to drop a bomb on this thread, but post Roe v. Wade there’s been an ethical debate about abortion and a partisan debate about abortion, and if you get two polar opposite groups of people in the same room to discuss it, it will devolve to screaming and bloody murder as both sides claim they are making a moral argument and the other is a partisan hack that cares nothing for the lives of babies|women.
Ethics are often an excuse for partisanship, and claims of partisanship are often an excuse to dismiss the other side’s ethics. It’s entirely possible that I’ve fallen into that trap myself, but I’ve never viewed Google as an apolitical animal. Maybe in their earlier days, but I was a kid in their earliest days. By the time I was politically self-aware, so was Google, and they’ve made plenty of political choices that from a certain perspective, a motivated person could argue they made from an ethical perspective.
The trouble with politics is most people don’t have political beliefs that they think are wrong. They have political beliefs because that’s what they friggin’ believe, and one of the reasons we consider free speech so essential under natural law and protect it from Congress in the 1st Amendment and the States through a process of incorporating the 1st Amendment against them is because it’s not an easy distinction to make. We made that choice back when partisans were calling themselves Congregationalists and Catholics and Anglicans and whatnot instead of Democrats and Republicans because the history of the reformation was one of Protestants and Catholics trying to seize the Armies of State power and wield them against their ecclesiastical enemies, in some cases literally burning them at the stake.
It is true that private corporations don’t have the same obligations as the State to respect free speech. They’re not governed by natural law, nor restricted by the Constitution, they’re actually protected because at the end of the day, a corporation is nothing more than a group of people pooling their assets to advance their own interests. Things like Section 230 are ultimately a liability shield against their users engaging in criminal activity, not criminal speech, but activity using their platforms to do it. The only problem is Google and Twitter and Facebook aren’t any better at making the distinction than you or I or Congress. There’s less at stake if they try, they don’t have the lawful power to stop, detain, arrest, jail, try, imprison, execute and kill that the State and it’s Officers do. But they’re putting themselves in the middle of a fecal hurricane by doing so and they’re not going to come out looking like upstanding moral citizens, they’re going to come out of this looking like unreliable, well, more unreliable business partners that will terminate contracts over partisan disagreements.
Partisanship is fine, and I certainly hope Google thinks it has some ethics, and whoever pulled the trigger on this undoubtedly thought they were doing some good for the world by doing so, just like all the Protestants and Catholics thought they were doing some good for the world by killing each other in bloody conflict after bloody conflict after bloody conflict. They all thought they had morals, and the moral high ground, but they also used politics to achieve their goals.
What isn’t fine, and I would argue ethically isn’t fine, is making partisan and even ethical choices, and being less than upfront about why you did so. You shouldn’t deceive people.
Its a free market, they can do what they want. In a normal market
However they enjoy specific liability protections (230),unlike most market participants. So, if they exercise choice, they also forego the liability protection.
They can choose to editorialize, at a cost of losing regulatory priviledges
because advertisers that pay Google don't want their ads to appear on ZeroHedge
There’s no evidence that this was driven by advertisers, it was a unilateral decision made by Google, influenced by a taxpayer-funded British pressure group. Does that count as election meddling by a foreign power I wonder?
Google has precedent for demonitizing people on the basis of their advertiser's "partisan" preferences... this one was super unpopular in the LGBT community:
So it seems plausible that Google could put ZeroHedge in a bucket tagged with, well, whatever seems appropriate, and let advertisers decide. If they wanted to. Which they appear to not.
The Wikipedia link you're citing does not have data that refutes OPs claim. It mentions several studies that seem to refute it, but in the next sentence(s), shows further studies which refute those.
Luckily, he made a very public post about it which is currently being discussed in one of the most influential tech news aggregators on the internet. If others are inspired and also leave the company, it will make an impact.
Facebook loses much more money with this employee's departure (if their salary is indeed 250k like you're claiming) -- the cost of recruiting, training, and keeping employees is incredibly high, especially in tech.
Now imagine that OP inspires 100 employees quit -- now Facebook has a problem that it must address, because it's threatening their bottom line.
I don't need to engage in politics in my workplace. I can work with people with differing political opinions in terms of activism and advocacy, though.
"Liberal" and "conservative" aren't the only political flavors, either. Lots of leftist activists don't work with liberals and lots of right-wing activists don't work with conservatives, for example. It's also difficult to work with someone whose beliefs conflict too much with your own or whose views are dehumanizing (like, I wouldn't want to work with someone who regards themselves as superior because of their race).
"All lives matter" is divisive because "black lives matter" is a statement that black lives are largely devalued and forgotten in a system of institutionalized racism. "Black lives matter" leaves off the implied "too": "black lives matter, too."
> "WTF is the impulse behind changing #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter. Do you crash strangers' funerals shouting I TOO HAVE FELT LOSS" - @arthur_affect on Twitter
Well, yes? That is, the phrase "all lives matter" seems like it's often used as a way to take control away from the discussion about largely devalued and forgotten black lives.
> This is not the case now in the largest part of the country, nor is it true in most parts of Europe. In other words, had BLM been around in the 1950's they would have been 'in control of the discussion' as they would have had the truth on their side. Nowadays this is not the case, those claims of 'systemic racism' are unfounded and easily refuted. [...] There are racist individuals, some of those may be in positions of power where they can effect racist policies over a limited amount of people but this is the exception, not the rule.
I strongly disagree with this premise. It's the claims that "systemic racism is dead" that are unfounded and easily refuted.
Where do you see systemic racism in current society? Do mind that 'systemic racism' has a specific meaning, it is racism expressed in the practice of social and political institutions. The only obvious example of systemic racism I can think of at the moment is the policy of certain academic institutions which demand higher grade averages from Asian students to be accepted compared to other groups but that is not what most people think of when hearing this term. There are individuals who are racist and some of those may be in a position to spread their racist ideas by way of their position in limited parts of society - e.g. a racist sheriff or prosecutor - but that is not the same as institutional/systemic racism.
"Demographic Differences in Sentencing" [9] -- " Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders. Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied. The differences in sentence length remained relatively unchanged compared to the Post-Gall period.", " Violence in an offender’s criminal history does not appear to account for any of the demographic differences in sentencing. Black male offenders received sentences on average 20.4 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders, accounting for violence in an offender’s past in fiscal year 2016, the only year for which such data is available. This figure is almost the same as the 20.7 percent difference without accounting for past violence. Thus, violence in an offender’s criminal history does not appear to contribute to the sentence imposed to any extent beyond its contribution to the offender’s criminal history score determined under the sentencing guidelines."
" New HUD Report Shows Continued Discrimination Against People of Color" [10] -- "People of color looking for homes are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than their white counterparts."
"Police harassment affects half of black youth, one-third of whites, study says" [11] -- "Ever since a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old walking home from a convenience store, criticism of unfair treatment of people of color by police has been a near-constant headline.
But the issue is hardly new to young black Americans, over 50 percent of whom reported knowing a victim of police harassment or violence in 2009, well before Michael Brown or Freddy Gray were household names throughout the country."
"You really can get pulled over for driving while black, federal statistics show" [12] -- "The Justice Department statistics, based on the Police-Public Contact Survey, show that "relatively more black drivers (12.8%) than white (9.8%) and Hispanic (10.4%) drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop during their most recent contact with police." Or, to frame it another way: A black driver is about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver, or about 23 percent more likely than a Hispanic driver. "Driving while black" is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon."
"‘Walking while black’ can be dangerous too, study finds" [13] -- "Sadly, it seems, “walking while black” can have dangerous consequences.
That’s because a recent study suggests motorists are less likely to stop for an African American pedestrian in a crosswalk. A black pedestrian’s wait time at the curb was about 32 percent longer than a white person’s. Black pedestrians were about twice as likely as white pedestrians to be passed by multiple vehicles.
The small but provocative study — conducted by researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Arizona — suggests that biases just outside people’s conscious awareness can make them less likely to yield to minority pedestrians. And that could put those pedestrians at risk, said Kimberly B. Kahn, an assistant professor of social psychology at Portland State University."
If you'd like, we can discuss gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other forms of disenfranchisement of minorities, which prevents any meaningful change to systemic racism.
"Study: ‘African-American Names’ 16% Less Likely to Be Approved for Airbnb Rentals" [3]
"Black Preschoolers Far More Likely To Be Suspended" [4] -- "Here's what the education data show: kids who are suspended or expelled from school are more likely to drop out, and those dropouts are more likely to end up with criminal records. In many places, school discipline pushes kids directly into the juvenile justice system. Take just one example: a school fight can end in an arrest for assault.
Education and civil rights groups have dubbed this phenomenon the "school-to-prison pipeline." There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that white students, even when the infractions are the same.
A new government study on discipline in the nation's public schools shows just how very early that gap is present. According to the report, black children make up 18 percent of preschoolers, but make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions. (We're talking mostly four-year-olds, people.)"
"CIVIL RIGHTS DATA COLLECTIONData Snapshot: School Discipline" [5] -- "Disproportionately high suspension/expulsion rates for students of color", "Disproportionate suspensions of girls of color",
"The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children" [6] -- "The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers.We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less “childlike” than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). Weexpected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being moreresponsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support forthese hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods.We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a lessessential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These datarepresent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this researchsuggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities."
"Black Crime Rates: What Happens When Numbers Aren’t Neutral" [7] -- "(1) If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person is more likely to be arrested. This is due in part to the fact that black people are more heavily policed.", "(2) When black people are arrested for a crime, they are convicted more often than white people arrested for the same crime.", "(3) When black people are convicted of a crime, they are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration compared to whites convicted of the same crime."
"Data Show Racial Disparity in Crack Sentencing" [8] -- "Speaking on the House floor last week, California Republican Rep. Dan Lungren acknowledged the potential racial effects of the old sentencing structure. "Certainly, one of the sad ironies in this entire episode is that a bill [the old sentencing structure] which was characterized by some as a response to the crack epidemic in African American communities has led to racial sentencing disparities which simply cannot be ignored in any reasoned discussion of this issue," said Lungren."
"Black unemployment rate is consistently twice that of whites" [0] -- "One common explanation, as William A. Darity Jr. of Duke University told Salon in 2011, is that blacks are “the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there’s a downturn, they’re the first to be released.” A 2010 article testing that “last hired, first fired” hypothesis against panel data from the Current Population Survey (from which the unemployment rate is derived) found considerable support for the “first fired” part but not for the “last hired” part: Blacks are in fact disproportionately likely to lose their jobs as the business cycle weakens"
"African-Americans With College Degrees Are Twice As Likely to Be Unemployed as Other Graduates" [1] -- "Schmitt pointed to a series of studies that have in recent years found that when trained sets of black and white testers with identical resumes are sent on interviews, white men with recent criminal histories are far more likely to receive calls back than black men with no criminal record at all."
"DiTomaso says the study, like other research, challenges the assumption that opportunity is available to all Americans who equip themselves with the right skills. Private-sector labor data reported to the federal government shows little change in the share of management and executive-level jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities since the 1980s, she said. In fact, in industries that offer workers the best wages, the share of white men in these jobs has actually grown.
The researchers behind the center's study of black college graduate employment patterns emphasized the role that the recession has played in dampening every worker's employment prospects. But they concluded that the long-term unemployment crisis among black college graduates ultimately could not be explained without accounting for continuing discrimination against black applicants."
"Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" [2] -- " We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market."
My observation is that "All Lives Matter" is not infrequently used as a derailing technique, to change the subject away from the subject matter that "Black Lives Matter" focuses on.
As such, your "what is important is the subject matter" is an incorrect analysis, as there are multiple matters.
> Systemic racism was a matter of fact in the first half of the previous century in the USA. This is not the case now in the largest part of the country, nor is it true in most parts of Europe.
Please present your evidence. The evidence I've seen from multiple sources, including personal observations, accounts of others, and scholarly research, says otherwise.
Your statement "matter of fact in the first half of the previous century in the USA" understates the legal racism until Civil Rights Act of 1964 - closer to 2/3rds of the 1900s than 1/2.
Part of the systemic racism we see now is a consequence of the laws then, such as redlining and lack of access to what was then "white suburbia", which meant that blacks could not build up anywhere near the same equity that current white Baby Boomers have - equity being one of the main forms of wealth in older people.
So even without specific laws, there's still the effects of legal racism.
> Wikipedia is not exactly the best place to start looking for absolute truth around politically contentious issues.
Shurg. Sure. There's is no single best place for anything. Perhaps you can recommend a better source for how smitty1e might better understand the objects to the term "All Lives Matter" rather than some inside-Wikipedia discussion which sounds more like derailing than something which is important is the subject matter?
For me, my comment should be interpreted as"I have checked this source, the information appears correct to me, and it explains the issues better than I can do in the time I care to write about this topic."
We spend so much time defending the rights of police to use military-grade weaponry on individual citizens that we forget that the people who are actually looting this country and committing its most grievous crimes are largely ignored.
It's a demand for accountants, lawyers, and law enforcement that focuses on egregious offenders and systemic injustice, eliminating the root causes of crime. Not tear gas and tanks.
You were speaking about crime in the 70s and 80s. That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?), brought to you by the same administration who gave us Iran-Contra [1], which largely introduced the US (LA specifically) to crack cocaine [2]. I believe every single person involved with that scandal was pardoned. Oliver North even had his own show on Fox News and became president of the NRA!
> It's a demand for accountants, lawyers, and law enforcement that focuses on egregious offenders and systemic injustice, eliminating the root causes of crime. Not tear gas and tanks.
Right, that's another word for police.
> That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?)
I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree?
> No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.
Now we're getting somewhere. By itself, no, it didn't. Institutionalized racism in the forms of employment, education, and housing discrimination carried from the 1960s caused largely-minority communities to remain segregated and poor while at the same time, white flight took money from the inner cities and moved it to the suburbs, leaving behind an underfunded and broken education system [0]. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act are relatively recent developments: 1964 and 1968, respectively -- just a little over 10 years before your father got to LA. By the 80s, increased class stratification and tough-on-crime initiatives from the federal government meant minorities and the poor faced even more disproportionately aggressive policing and incarceration. With little hope of achieving the same success as their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs, many individuals turned to crime as a mode of survival. Then came Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and gangs.
Of course, if you're talking about true gangs in the US during this time, we can also discuss the American mafia, white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, or even the gangs depicted in the film, "Gangs of New York" in the "Five Points" area of NY (but this is an example of some of the first gangs in the US, around the late 1700s -- thought some historical context would be interesting). These gangs, however, have faced less scrutiny because of their close connections with law enforcement and government.
[0] For a heartbreaking account of the devastating long term effects of this, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"
I should also clarify that this history is focused on the Los Angeles area around 1960s-1990s, viewed from the lens of the drug war. Gangs had existed in the country for a long time before the 60s (and in LA, too -- Bloods and Crips), but the proliferation of crack into the US via Los Angeles caused an explosion in the crime rate.
For brevity's sake, I'm also ignoring a lot of other serious issues related to police relations with the citizens of LA (e.g., Watts riots in '65, Rodney King in '92), which should be considered to paint a full picture of the antagonisms that have led us to where we are today. The drug war didn't create gangs (they existed before), but it poured fuel on the fire which led to a lot of the violence in that area in the 80s/90s.
I don't think they're advocating for disbanding the department completely (from the article):
> I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.
Minorities are not responsible for the racism perpetuated against them. It's not a "marketing problem" that minorities need to solve, it's a racism problem that the perpetrators need to solve.
Minorities have been trying to prove their worth to the US since the inception of the country (which was built on their backs). It hasn't changed anything.
And why isn't it that the non-minorities shouldn't be the ones who are groveling and seeking to be model citizens? Remember that if a white police officer hadn't killed a black man in the street, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. By your logic, shouldn't all white people now be tainted by his actions and forced to acquiesce to cultural standards set by non-whites?
If I disparaged your race, would you say the onus is on you to prove me wrong?
Perception is mostly shaped by frequency. It doesn't matter that much what most people of the minority do. It matters what the others see.
To give you an example: if you have little personal contact to a specific minority, and over 50% of the people of that minority you see on TV are either criminals on local news, or musicians and actors playing gangsters, everyone who doesn't have a lot of contact with them in real life is getting scared every time they see someone who fits the profile.
It's up to the majority to give the minorities opportunities to present themselves in the best light, but you can't force someone to be not racist. Even those who don't want to be have an unconscious bias. You need frequent positive impressions of that minority to get a good overall impression and avoid that bias.
By the way, this is not limited to race, but also for example applies to people with tattoos. If all tattooed people you see are criminals, you are scared by tattooed people as well. It works with every property of people that's easily visible.
> To give you an example: if you have little personal contact to a specific minority, and over 50% of the people of that minority you see on TV are either criminals on local news, or musicians and actors playing gangsters, everyone who doesn't have a lot of contact with them in real life is getting scared every time they see someone who fits the profile.
Yes, I agree that the portrayal of minorities in the mass media in the Western world is incredibly racist. Part of the reason for this is the racism inherent in the US justice system -- you're currently witnessing worldwide protests over it.
However, I also see many representations of non-minorities portrayed in negative light -- why is it that only minorities are forced to atone for fictionalized representations of themselves and are not regarded as individuals with their own agency, lives, dreams, hopes, pains, and instead must be lumped into the same group and called to account for the actions of someone that happens to have the same skin color?
> By the way, this is not limited to race, but also for example applies to people with tattoos. If all tattooed people you see are criminals, you are scared by tattooed people as well. It works with every property of people that's easily visible.
People choose to be tattooed.
"Be more visibly obedient to the cultural norms of racists" is not a valid suggestion for addressing systemic racism.
> Part of the reason for this is the racism inherent in the US justice system
What's the root cause of that? A long time ago it was an economic incentive, but that incentive doesn't exist anymore. Today, I think, it's bias.
> instead must be lumped into the same group and called to account for the actions of someone that happens to have the same skin color
Because that's how the human brain works. It classifies things based on previous experiences. It is biased by design. You need to change the input to change the outcome.
Luckily, today, media is a huge part of the input and thus it is relatively easy to change.
> People choose to be tattooed.
Yes. But you are arguing on a different level. You are arguing in terms of fairness and guilt. I would agree with you on that level if that would be all there is to it. If there was a way that the majority could overcome racism by just wanting it enough, I would also agree with you. But in the real world you can not change the perception of other people without at least some cooperation to create an impression that creates a positive experience.
Some people chose to be part of a visually distinctive group. Others are just born into it. But independent of how you got into the group, the consequences are the same. Not because it is fair (it isn't), but just because that's the way humans work.
> "Be more visibly obedient to the cultural norms of racists"
You can change the cultural norms to avoid elements of racism, and you can change the norms to find a middle ground, but I don't think you can live in a world without bias without also having common cultural norms. People are always biased against those who live outside their cultural norms.
