ROBERT TRACINSKI: No One Expects The Google Inquisition, But It’s Coming: The Google memo controversy could tear up the implicit social contract we’ve all accepted with the big technology companies to whom we entrust our data.

These big companies are dangerous. They need to be broken up and regulated. In the public interest.

AND RIGHTLY SO: New York Times mocked for comparing threat of climate change and nuclear war.

THE ATLANTIC: A Question for Google’s CEO.

When CEO Sundar Pichai addressed a controversial memo about diversity that circulated inside Google, culminating in the termination of its author, James Damore, he began by telling the company’s 72,053 employees that “we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.”

“However,” he added, “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not okay. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct.”

I have a question for the CEO.

Given that the full text of the memo is public, that it is the subject of a national debate on an important subject, that many educated people disagree with one another about what claims it made, and that clarity can only help Google employees adhere to the company’s rules going forward, would you be willing to highlight the memo using green to indicate the “much” that you identified as “fair to debate” and red to flag the “portions” that you deemed Code-of-Conduct violations?

Absent that, it seems to me that Google employees will remain as uncertain as ever about what they can and cannot say at the company. As an illustration, consider Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Baylor University who declares himself confused about your meaning:

How badly has Pichai screwed the pooch? So badly that David Brooks is calling for his scalp.

THE GOOGLE ARCHIPELAGO: In an article at the Weekly Standard that was likely written before Google’s meltdown this week headlined, “You Can’t Say That,” a review of the recent book The Demon in Democracy, Matthew B. Crawford asks, “Has liberalism taken a Soviet turn?”

Through the ’80s, ’90s, and into the new millennium, the phrase “politically correct” would crop up here and there. Among people who were credited as being sophisticated, use of the term would be met with a certain exasperation: It was needling and stale. The phrase had been picked up by the likes of College Republicans and Fox News, and if you had an ear for intellectual class distinctions you avoided it.

Originally a witticism, the term suggested there was something Soviet-like in the policing of liberal opinion. When it first came into wide circulation, was it anything but humorous hyperbole? Is that still the case today?

A sociologist might point to a decline in social trust over the past few decades—they have ways of measuring this—and speculate about its bearing on political speech. One wonders: Who am I talking to? How will my utterances be received? What sort of allegiances are in play here? In the absence of trust, it becomes necessary to send explicit signals. We become fastidious in speech and observe gestures of affirmation and condemnation that would be unnecessary among friends.

It’s a great review, and well worth your time to read the whole thing. Crawford’s question, “Has liberalism taken a Soviet turn?”, dovetails remarkably well with this week’s events. In the article by James D. Miller that Glenn linked to on Wednesday titled “Get ready for the ‘tech alt-right’ to gain influence in Silicon Valley,” Miller wrote:

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.

It will prevent the left and right from getting meaningful feedback on their belief. Plus, if progressives never talked with people on the right, they wouldn’t get to learn that most of us do not fit their stereotypes of being sexist monsters.

When SJWs in Silicon Valley realize that their ideological enemies are hiding, they might actively search them out. They might become suspicious of the guy who was the first to stop clapping when a new diversity initiative was announced. Even worse, SWJs in human resources might become reluctant to hire those with characteristics correlated with conservatism, such as past military service.

That line about SJWs becoming suspicious about “the guy who was the first to stop clapping when a new diversity initiative was announced” is Straight Outta the Kremlin, comrade. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the fate of the man who stopped clapping first:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

* * * * * * * *

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

And the world’s biggest search engine is well on its way to becoming The Google Archipelago. In an article Orwellianly titled “Internal Messages Show Some Googlers Supported Fired Engineer’s Manifesto” (heaven Lenin forefend — root out the hoarders and wreckers!) in Wired, which began as a libertarian-leaning publication before being purchased by the lefties at Condé Nast, the writer quotes from an anonymous Google employee. “‘Let’s take a step back,’ the Googler wrote, ‘and look at what is actually making everyone in Google upset on this thread and in general since the start of the 2016 election season.’ He went on to describe how the apparent uniformity of thought at Google led people like Damore to feel ‘like they are being forcibly dragged into [sic] ideological indoctrination chamber,’” including these passages that sound like mash notes smuggled out of the Ministry of Truth:

Weekly public (though thankfully anonymous) shaming of employees for misdeeds as slight as anachronistic use of “guys” for a mixed gender group

Frequent references to documents that stigmatize open disagreement with a a rage [sic] of positions

Call for employees to give each other hugs at an all hands meeting because the wrong candidate won a presidential election in the country, following by a mass mailing on how to help your kids deal with grief due to the same occurrence

In a piece at the Federalist titled “No One Expects The Google Inquisition, But It’s Coming,” Robert Tracinski spots another Stalin-esque element to be found in the above article at Wired:

In the new Internet version [of commercial advertising], we know these big companies are gathering specific personal information about our habits and preferences, far more than anyone has ever done, but we accept it because we think they’re just going to use it to sell us stuff, which might sometimes be annoying but isn’t ominous. But if we think there is a wider purpose, if we think they’re going to use our information for social engineering or political manipulation—will that break the bargain?

In this regard, the most important part of the story is those photographed screenshots intended to out Googlers who agreed with Damore. Why were they photographs of a computer screen rather than actual screenshots grabbed by the computer itself, which would have had much better resolution? I suspect it’s because this would leave evidence behind on work computers, so the leakers might get caught. This implies the leakers know what they’re doing is against internal Google rules—just as leaking Damore’s original memo to the media was against internal Google rules.

I don’t want to get into the debates we see around the Trump administration about which is worse: what we found out about our leaders because of the leaks, or the fact that so much information is being leaked. What’s relevant here is that Google now faces a pattern in which its employees are taking internal information and leaking it to the media, against the company’s own rules and safeguards, in order to achieve political objectives. If the wider public starts to figure out that this is happening, they just might decide this is not a company they want to trust with their information or access to their lives.

And they would be wise to do so. At the conclusion of a post today on the hypocrisy of Google firing Damore over his memo but making billions off of gender-based data-mining and targeted advertising code, Rod Dreher links to this scene from the 2006 film on the East German Stasi, The Lives of Others:

Dreher’s captions the clip, “A scene from the Google cafeteria.” He’s likely not all that far off.

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NONSENSE. IF WE DID THAT, ALL SORTS OF ACTIVISTS AND APPARATCHIKS WOULD BE OUT OF A JOB: Why It’s Time To Stop Worrying About First World ‘Gender Gaps.’

IT’S COME TO THIS: Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh, Who Offered Bill Clinton Oral Sex, Decries Mrs. Trump’s Degrading High Heels.

Meanwhile, New York magazine’s women-oriented spin-off Website The Cut has an article titled “Political Peroxide — Blonde privilege,” in which the leftwing racial grievance division really has their decoding machines turned up to Bletchley Park levels:

Fox News America is a place where all the classic signifiers of privilege and wealth work on overdrive: country-club-issue blue blazers with brass buttons and khaki pants, and above all else, for women, that yellow-blonde, carefully tended hair — a dog whistle of whiteness, an unspoken declaration of values, a wink-wink to the power of racial privilege and to the 1980s vibe that pervades a movement led by a man who still believes in the guilt of the Central Park Five.

As James Taranto likes to say, if you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog. Or as Alex Griswald of the Washington Free Beacon tweets, “Really banner day for progressive publications attacking conservative women for their appearance.”

SO MICHAEL MOORE HAS A PLAY ON BROADWAY, AND EVEN LIBERAL REVIEWERS SAY IT’S A GODAWFUL HOUR AND A HALF OF THE MOST BORING FIRE AND BRIMSTONE PROGRESSIVE CHURCH YOU COULD IMAGINE: When you’ve lost the Gray Lady…

“The Terms of My Surrender,” which opened on Thursday at the Belasco, is a bit like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous, self-regarding, time-sucking uncle. Gotta love him — but maybe let’s turn on the television.

…

Mr. Moore, awkward and often tongue-tied, is not a natural stage creature. There is a script, but it seems to be more of a reconfigurable scaffold, changing from night to night…A lot of the material is thus delivered semi-impromptu, with all the stutters and longueurs that entails.

To make up for this Mr. Moore affects a cute, common-man delivery that fools no one, though the crowd at the Belasco, including a few shills, claps for almost all of the bait he tosses. Some toss bait back, including vulgar imprecations against the president that are hardly distinguishable from the cries of “Lock her up” that horrify us in other settings.

Ticket prices for Moore’s show range from $29.00 in the balcony to $149.00 for an orchestra row seat. How many people will say, “Man, I’ve got $300 burning a hole in my pocket; I want an exciting night on the town – honey, let’s go see Michael Moore on Broadway!!”

NICK GILLESPIE: The Google Memo Exposes a Libertarian Blindspot When It Comes To Power: It’s not just the state that wields power and squelches good-faith debate.

This is true, though it’s also true that nowadays the line between public and private power is (by design) quite blurred.

I KNOW I SAID “CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR,” BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: Trump Fans Gleefully Appropriate Anti-Trump Chicken for Meme Magic.

TAM KEEL FOR THE WIN:

HOW MANY MILLENNIALS CAN USE A MAP AND COMPASS? Radio navigation set to make global return as GPS backup, because cyber.

BREAKING: These McMaster Advisors Are Running the ‘Smear’ Campaign to Save His Job.

Deputy National Security Adviser Rick Waddell, Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Gulf States Joel Rayburn, and Yll Bajraktari, a former special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense during the Obama administration, have been coordinating an extensive public relations campaign in support of embattled National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, according to multiple sources.

Members of the national security community who spoke with PJ Media describe the talking points used during this effort to defend McMaster’s tenure as NSA as “absurd,” “dishonest,” and “comically inaccurate.” But sources primarily expressed anger regarding insinuations that NSC members fired by McMaster or otherwise no longer in their positions — such as K.T. McFarland, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and Derek Harvey — are gone for reasons other than ideology.

Over the past week, several media accounts have painted them as “conspiratorial” members of the “alt-right,” possibly leaking information to the controversial Mike Cernovich, and possibly working in tandem with Russian social media accounts. Such claims, which have been picked up by several outlets, are reportedly doing lasting damage to reputations and careers.

Read the whole thing.

“WHY ISN’T THERE A JOCKSTRAP FOR WOMEN?” The history of the sports bra.

(Via Virginia Postrel.)

OOPS: Glamour Writer Unintentionally Reveals What Liberals Really Think of Conservative Women. And It’s Not Pretty.

ANDREW KLAVAN:  Why Detroit Bombed:

People don’t want to spend their summer entertainment hours watching folks get tortured and killed by psycho racist cops.

I’m not sure there’s any more to the film’s failure than that. But if the left had wanted to destroy this movie’s commercial chances, if they had plotted and planned to strip it of legitimacy and appeal, they could not have done anymore than they have.

Read the whole thing.

Personally, I blame intersectionality. No – really. You can get whiplash spotting the dueling headlines over the past couple of weeks that (A) a white woman shouldn’t have directed a film about a significant moment in black American history and that (B) there should be a quota system in Hollywood to require more female directors. (As someone tweeted in response, “Everyone knows the best art is created with quotas.”)

When all entertainment is reduced to being “problematic” to this or that leftwing grievance group, no wonder the industry can’t do much beyond, as Glenn recently wrote, “Comic book movies, redos, and redos of comic book movies. A vast wasteland.” Dunkirk is the exception that proves the rule, but its director is a superstar thanks to his comic book movies and the rest of his past oeuvre. With the exception of Zero Dark Thirty (which didn’t top the magic 100 million dollar mark in its US gross), Kathryn Bigelow’s movies have never come close to Christopher Nolan’s box office.

All of which is why, as Kurt Schlichter writes, “Politically Correct Hollywood Is Doomed.” In no small part because once again, the SJW crowd is devouring their own.

DRIVING THE 2016 MAZDA 6. “There is no more stylish, sporty, or maturely executed mid-size sedan than the Mazda 6. Our other favorite, the Honda Accord, hides its excellence behind a veil of stoicism. Not the Mazda, which boasts an attractive body that sits atop a sharp-handling chassis and wraps around a luxury-grade interior.”

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL FEMALE EMPOWERMENT: Second Unit of Yazidi Women Fighters Moves Into Raqqa to Crush ISIS.

OWN GOAL: WaPo Writer Just Accidentally Made the Perfect Case for Why Kaepernick Is Still Unemployed:

Feinstein’s post is titled, “The NFL cowards who aren’t signing Colin Kaepernick,” but one line sticks out more than the rest.

“If Kaepernick were Tom Brady, Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott or any of the other star quarterbacks in the league, he’d have a job,” he writes.

It’s a hard point to argue against.

Heh.™

ACTUAL NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE TODAY: “NORTH KOREA ASIDE, GUAM FACES ANOTHER THREAT: CLIMATE CHANGE.”

No need to worry — Hank Johnson assures me that the island will tip over before this becomes an issue.

(Link safe; goes to the Daily Caller.)

LOOK UP: 2017 Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend.

JON GABRIEL: YOU’RE OFFENDED BY THIS COLUMN? SO (BLEEPING) WHAT?

LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: NYT Admits Its Front Page Climate Change Article Was Wrong.

“An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report,” TheNYT wrote in its correction issued Wednesday morning. “While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.”

TheNYT ran a front page article Tuesday claiming to have exclusively obtained a draft climate report that “directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet” on global warming.

Unnamed scientists told TheNYT they feared the Trump administration would suppress the climate report. The report is part of the National Climate Assessment that’s released to the public every four years.

Climate scientists that worked on the report, however, were quick to point out it’s been online since January.

Other than that, great scoop.