Daniel Hannan, Great Britain’s Conservative MEP, had a tweet concerning why the EU wants such an outlandish ransom exit fee from Great Britain as a condition of its release from the EU. The tweet and thread are worth reading in their own right, but Richard (@richardm680923) made his own virtually dispositive point in that thread with this image:
Recall the now ex-employee who wrote a lengthy and thought-out memo for internal distribution via one of what Google is pleased to call its open communication channels. A summary of the ex-employee’s case is in the Sunday Wall Street Journal; my comments on the situation, based on that summary, are below.
…critics saying the company squelched free speech by firing a male employee who wrote a divisive memo denouncing its diversity push, while others said his views showed that the company’s diversity policies were needed.
Both the critics and “others” are right: the incident clearly demonstrates need for open debate and discussion, not the need to suppress discussion and debate by firing the one who raised the question.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said…to suggest “colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”
Commenters here, in the WSJ comment thread, and elsewhere can offer data on either side of that claim. Pichai’s decision to provide none is beyond arrogant; it’s dishonest. As is Danielle Brown’s decision to speak solely ex Cathedra ab umbilico in her responding memo, similarly without the first minim of actual data. We’re just supposed to accept the bald statements of these august personages.
Indeed, here’s a Google spokesman responding to a WSJ request for comment/elaboration:
He violated our Code of Conduct, period.
Not gonna discuss it. Sit down, and shut up.
As an aside, there is this much in the WSJ piece [emphasis added]:
…[the ex-employee] wrote that biological differences explain some of the gap between male and female tech workers….
Indeed. The more mendacious NLMSM is carefully omitting that qualifier.
The memo can be seen on Gizmodo here, along with Google’s vapid response.
What a way to go, indeed.
That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and it indicates an unwarranted optimism about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “investigation.”
The problem is that Mueller’s investigation is expected to run at least into the end of 2018—packing a 6-month investigation (which already has run for nearly a year under other auspices) into 18 months, or seven years, like the Iran-Contra investigation, depending on the election cycle. And that’s the point—to poison election cycles that might go the wrong way.
This is substantiated by the appalling leak rate Mueller is allowing his team to have. He has no intention of running this thing quickly and efficiently.
Lawyer Gray can hope for a more prompt outcome than Iran-Contra, but he’s whistling in the dark.
Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) thinks the Republican Party should have put the kibosh on then-citizen Donald Trump’s birtherism regarding then-candidate and later then-President Barack Obama, and he’s right about that. The birtherism bit was just a bit of trolling and head gamesmanship, but it spread and became a distraction for Republicans.
But on the matter of Hillary Clinton and Trump-supported and occasionally -led chants of “lock her up,” Flake misunderstands.
We shouldn’t be the party for jailing your political opponents[.]
It’s true that the Republican Party shouldn’t be that party. However, the Republican Party should be the party of law enforcement and of putting criminals in jail or otherwise holding them to account and sanctioning them for their criminal behavior. The political status of a criminal should not make that criminal immune to jail or other sanction for her criminal behavior.
That’s a fine line to draw, but it is drawable, and it should be drawn. Juries are fully capable of drawing that line, and politicians should be, too.
Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.
The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling. The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.
The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.
That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.
No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.