According to the Guardian[1], "Damore initially told the Guardian he would answer questions by email on Monday, but then stopped responding to inquiries. He had a few brief email exchanges with reporters, including at the New York Times, Bloomberg and the rightwing site website Breitbart."
If he wanted to get his side of the story out after being fir4ed, he could have taken advantage of any of many news organizations - which range across the political spectrum - that were offering a platform to speak from. Instead, he stopped responding to those requests and gave an interview with an "alt-right", "men's rights" activist host, Stefan Molyneux. This is one of the worst things he could have done if he wanted to avoid being associated with misogyny.
I get the impression that a lot of people are not familiar with how fascist ("alt-right") propaganda works. While Molyneux's audience is large, interviewing with the NYT or Breitbart would have reached a larger audience, so this isn't about getting his story out. This isn't about the contents of the memo and the bad science about sex-linked preferences. It's about repeating the idea as many times as possible until the idea of discriminating against women becomes normalizes as a legitimate political question.
The lawsuit itself is similar: it keeps people talking about discrimination. The propaganda works regardless of the outcome of the case. If you want to see a very good explanation of how this type of propaganda works, see this[2] explanation of how "Triumph of the Will" probably influenced your mental model of the Nazi party.
Perhaps he read the articles about his memo and refused to work with those media organizations that took his remarks out of context and ignored his clear statement that:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
The Guardian misrepresented the memo, why would Damore trust them to publish the interview honestly?
> The Guardian misrepresented the contents of the memo, why would Damore trust them to publish the interview honestly?
An argument about how the Guardian's supposed misrepresentation of the memo is would conveniently distraction away from my main point: he ran straight to an alt-right misogynist for his first interview instead of taking any of the other options.
What's the innocuous explanation for first speaking out on Stefan Molyneux's channel? That Damore has only heard of Molyneux, but Molyneux happened to be the first to successfully reach out to Damore?
Or if we assume Damore was the initiator in getting his story out, why would Molyneux be the first contact, as opposed to someone like Cernovich, who has a much bigger audience and has been blogging/tweeting in extensive support of Damore? I suppose Damore believes there's a substantive difference in politics/style/production between Molyneux/Cernvoich/Peterson/etc. But that he knows enough about Molyneux to want to give him priority probably means Damore is not just a causal fan.
I get that Damore doesn't trust nor feel obligated to talk to the left-wing-side of media, e.g. CNN/MSNBC/NYT. But literally anyone at FOX News would be just as sympathetic as Molyneux towards Damore, while having a bigger audience and more mainstream credibility (plus, production values that doesn't make Damore look and sound like a basement Twitch streamer).
(I don't watch Molyneux enough to have a strong opinion about his associations. But given his decent-but-not-huge channel, seems unusual that he'd be Damore's first pick by chance, given Damore's many options).
> That Damore has only heard of Molyneux, but Molyneux happened to be the first to successfully reach out to Damore?
What's wrong with that explanation?
Perhaps Damore, like most of us, doesn't watch any of Molyneux/Cernvoich/Peterson and thus simply accepted an interview from whoever contacted him first.
No, the order is not important. The point that your three replies have carefully avoided is that it was his choice to associate himself with a prominent alt-right misogynist.
You even suggested that he really avoided mainstream sources fearing misrepresentation, which means Molyneux must was his safe space.
And your point is ... that every op ed piece in a newspaper (in this case, 'Julie Bindel is a freelance journalist and political activist, and a founder of Justice for Women') reflects the position of the newspaper as a whole?
Er, why do you put "freelance" in quotes? Being a freelance vs. staff member is not about number of articles you've written, but how and how much you are paid, the benefits you receive, who you report to in the editorial bureaucracy, and your day-to-day obligations to the company.
She seems to write a lot of op-ed type pieces, which are meant to "oppose" the editorial page (in a physical sense, but sometimes in voice/topic). The fact that the freelance editor is OK with working with her, over and over, is not nothing. Just as Bret Stephens being hired as a NYT columnist is not nothing about the NYT's priorities, even as he has no contact or relationship with NYT's news reporters.
My point was that the word freelance suggests someone is independent of the organization, while writing 383 articles for The Guardian suggests otherwise.
Clearly she likes The Guardian and they like her opinion very much.
More significantly, their opinion writers range from left to extreme left.
Again, what is your point? Do you think opinion pieces must be in lock-step with the newspaper as a whole?
All you've shown is that The Guardian publishes pieces from people with views that typically lie on the left (though are not reflective of everyone on the left). Which is, you know, the "left" in "center left".
"center left" != centrist != far left. You claim The Guardian is far left. All you've demonstrated is that they are somewhere on the left, and I (and Wikipedia) claim they are center-left.
"Then Guardian features editor Ian Katz asserted in 2004 that "it is no secret we are a centre-left newspaper".[120] In 2008, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley said that editorial contributors were a mix of "right-of-centre libertarians, greens, Blairites, Brownites, Labourite but less enthusiastic Brownites, etc," and that the newspaper was "clearly left of centre and vaguely progressive". She also said that "you can be absolutely certain that come the next general election, The Guardian's stance will not be dictated by the editor, still less any foreign proprietor (it helps that there isn't one) but will be the result of vigorous debate within the paper".[121] The paper's comment and opinion pages, though often written by centre-left contributors such as Polly Toynbee, have allowed some space for right-of-centre voices such as Sir Max Hastings and Michael Gove. "
Are you really that oblivious as to what the real far-left looks like?
Typically it applies to someone to the left of social democracy, like a Communist, Trotskyist, democratic socialist, or Maoist.
While https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Bindel describes her as: While focusing on male violence against women, Bindel also writes about gender inequality in general, as well as stalking, religious fundamentalism, lesbian rights, opposition to the sex industry and human trafficking.[8] She refers to herself as a political lesbian feminist.
This is mainstream feminist left, not far-left.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is further to the left. Here are some of his policies, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon#Politi...: He is a proponent of increased labour rights and the expansion of French welfare programmes.[33] Mélenchon has also called for the mass redistribution of wealth to rectify existing socioeconomic inequalities.[33] Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100 per cent income tax on all French citizens earning more than 360,000 Euros a year, full state reimbursement for health care costs, a reduction in presidential powers in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws.[34] Mélenchon supports women's right to abortion and same-sex marriage. He also supports the legalisation of cannabis.[35]
He founded La France Insoumise, a democratic socialist political party. He started as a member of the Internationalist Communist Organisation.
Again, I fail to understand your point. How does this show that The Guardian is a far-left newspaper?
The example from Gove was to point out that your statement that The Guardian "publishes the opinion of people on the left and on the far left" but not from the right is incorrect.
Are you going to update all of the Wikipedia pages from "centre-right" to "far right"? Because it looks like to me that you have no idea of what "far left" really means. Perhaps you think that that anything to the left of the US Democratic Party is "far left"?
Also, most of what you mentioned aren't on the left/right spectrum. There are many leftists who hold completely opposing views.
This, like any argument about the meaning of left and right, is pointless.
Nobody can clearly define what those terms mean anyway. Perhaps we can agree The Guardian is centre-left by UK standards and far-left by American standards.
Like I ask, what Overton window are you looking through?
Answer: the US one, where there's been 80 years of anti-communist, anti-socialist propaganda to turn "liberal" and "progressive" into slurs and to keep people from knowing what "the left" really means.
The UK standard in this regard is shared with most of the rest of Europe and the European ex-colonies (South America, Australia, South Africa, etc.) It's the US which is the odd-one-out.
If he wanted to get his side of the story out after being fir4ed, he could have taken advantage of any of many news organizations - which range across the political spectrum - that were offering a platform to speak from. Instead, he stopped responding to those requests and gave an interview with an "alt-right", "men's rights" activist host, Stefan Molyneux. This is one of the worst things he could have done if he wanted to avoid being associated with misogyny.
I get the impression that a lot of people are not familiar with how fascist ("alt-right") propaganda works. While Molyneux's audience is large, interviewing with the NYT or Breitbart would have reached a larger audience, so this isn't about getting his story out. This isn't about the contents of the memo and the bad science about sex-linked preferences. It's about repeating the idea as many times as possible until the idea of discriminating against women becomes normalizes as a legitimate political question.
The lawsuit itself is similar: it keeps people talking about discrimination. The propaganda works regardless of the outcome of the case. If you want to see a very good explanation of how this type of propaganda works, see this[2] explanation of how "Triumph of the Will" probably influenced your mental model of the Nazi party.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w