George Rebane

A most puzzling question – why is Putin acting as if Russia’s chances for achieving its national interests under the present US-led world order are worse than under an unknown world order that will arise when/if Putin, Islam, and the American Left successfully upsets US leadership?

Absent any believable and propitious policy initiatives from the Democrats, the Left is reduced to its historical MO of pandering to people who don’t have the intellectual tools to understand or evaluate what they are told.  The current diversionary full-court press in the lamestream media appears to be a political redoubt into which they have retreated, to then do what??  Emerge with some new killer program of initiatives that will sweep all opposition from the public mind?  Or just hunker down and continue lobbing politically correct ‘bombshells’, hoping one of them will finally derail Team Trump, or in the interval see the Republicans splinter and eat their own?

Look for Google to go into corporatist hyper-drive in the coming years.  The left-leaning company has now become so politically correct with its internal policies – especially with regard to race, gender, and ideology – and office milieu that an unnamed male software engineer has written an extended sober critique of the situation for his colleagues which has gone viral (here)  The Left, of course, is outraged and its newly hired VP of Diversity discombobulated by the unauthorized and freewheeling discussions/debate the memo has launched.  And here is a better measure of the depth of this disease; this is the response from one of the software engineer’s bosses who “wrote the memo ‘troubled me deeply’ because it suggested ‘most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.’” (yes; you really can’t make this up)

But what it all reveals about Google is most interesting.  When companies manage to achieve this stage of entangled undies, their competitive performance inevitably suffers and future fortunes must be bought and paid for through and to appropriate government contacts.  It was ever thus.

[8aug17 update]  Well I’ll be a sumbich, Google fired Mr James Damore, the software engineer who wrote the memo.  And the reason?  Wrongthink.  Yes, boys and girls, our society has now undeniably arrived on the outskirts of the Orwellian world in which you can be proscribed and punished for revealing that you are thinking ‘wrong thoughts’.  (more here)

But here’s the important point yet to be raised in the debate on this action by one of the world’s largest and most influential corporations.  If a private corporation restricts its employee policy to work related functions that support its commercial objectives, then one can argue that employees should restrict their workplace behaviors to the business at hand, and not use the work hours and venue to proselytize their thoughts on other topics.  However, if the corporation itself addends to its employee policy and proselytizes in the workplace such things as ideology-driven social engineering desiderata, then it should be the commensurate ‘right’ of every employee to express their own ideas about said desiderata in the workplace.  And if that means pushing back on the corporation’s extra-commercial messaging, then so be it, the corporation has no grounds for dunning the employee for equally sharing their thoughts as long as such activity does not subtract from the employee’s productivity.  After all, the purpose of the corporation was to make a profit selling its goods/services, and not to act as an adjunct ideological re-education center for its workers.  (The 8aug17 WSJ dances around this topic here, but doesn’t quite connect the dots.)

However, that clearly is not the case today where diversity VPs also wear the hat of corporate thought police, and can severely punish workers who dare voice opinions and ideas that are counter to the corporation’s politically correct lines of thought.  Welcome to the early onset of 2084.

[9aug17 update]  More on the joys of Obamacare, Rasmussen reports that 6.5 million Americans paid their fine rather than sign up for that latest progressive-promoted paragon of social engineering – a fact studiously ignored by the lamestream and leftwingers everywhere. (more here)