That is truly depressing. CNN used to be one of the last places to get non-ideological journalism. Looks like non-partisan journalism really is dead, as is the principle of charity.
It would have been much more fair to call it an "anti affirmative-action memo". Framing it as an "anti-diversity screed" is a pretty biased move, not to mention how they removed his supporting content as well. Certainly there are many who hold the opinion that "anti affirmative-action === anti diversity", which is a point worth debating separately, but I still find the framing used by most of the news articles very misleading.
This (conflating opposition to a process or movement for X with opposition to X) seems to be a common trick in the political discourse nowadays, and is unfortunately called out very rarely. We didn't hear many instances of "anti-jobs" as suggested in this article, but it seems like describing a variety of institutions as "anti-white" has been a right-wing staple since long before the emergence of well-connected Tumblr and Twitter rubes who could plausibly be described as such.
Wow, it's not enough to even wait for this guy to get fired and then discuss, right or wrong, but they even have to write articles just salivating with the very anticipation of it...
This is a big group of people gathered around the stake chattering to each other in gleeful anticipation of burning a heretic. Even if this guy is wrong about everything, the spectacle is extremely disturbing.
I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions.
I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting remarks about people that I care about.
Once, during an oncall shift, I pulled an all-nighter dealing with PagerDutys trying to keep our team's systems up; came in the next day and had to sit through a presentation where an assortment of republican party figures (no, not just Trump) were used as examples of "low IQ people" as part of some contrived metaphor that speaker was trying to make. Everyone laughed. No one made any comment about how this was unprofessional/inappropriate. Felt pretty angry.
This kind of environment is unhelpful to everyone. Obviously for folks on the right it is unpleasant, but for folks on the left it contributes to a culture of excessive contempt and hatred, increasingly detached from any actual contact with the people that they hate. This is not helpful for building winning coalitions.
It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc.
To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.
It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...
