Ann Althouse: Damore May Be Right *And* There May Be Lots Of Sexism At Google

Good point.

   That's very roughly what's up in philosophy--there really is (somewhere between a little and lots of) sexism and sexual harassment. There's also a lot of fanatical PC / SJ / IP lunacy. And it's good and reasonable people who end up being targets of one type of this bullshit or other. Or both. The harassers and the fanatics deserve each other--but the rest of us deserve neither of them. 

   Though, as I've said before, it's important to me that the harassers are outlaws--they're bad people and almost all of us acknowledge this--but the system can't (or, in some cases, won't) catch them. The political fanatics have co-opted the system and largely control it. Their craziness is institutionalized. Seems to me that that's worse than the other thing. There'll always be criminals we can't catch. That's a practical failure of a kind human life is full of. Institutionalizing irrationality and injustice is a completely different kind of thing. That's something more like a self-inflicted injury or unforced error. We'll never be able to eliminate every bad thing about humans. But we should be able to avoid intentionally instituting bad policies and building bad institutions. 

   It's kind of like the difference between (a) having a system that can't catch all the murderers and (b) building a system that aims (and functions) to murder. For the love of God, we ought to at least be able to avoid doing (b).