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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

While looking for a job in my country I saw a company EXPLICITLY advertise they wanted to hire a woman for a coder job, and men shouldn't apply.

This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.

Thing is... it is still illegal (in fact companies here that really need a specific gender, for example when hiring female airport security so they can deal with female passengers and whatnot, companies go through crazy legal hoops, because our gender discrimination law has no exception, no loophole, nothing).

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A scarey thing about cultural movements is how they take the law with them. A system of law is only as just as its layers judges and juries.

This is actually a good thing. Laws that are unresponsive to unwritten cultural norms (and their changes over time) are extremely inflexible, and the position that they should be so inflexible is a radically conservative one.

Responsiveness to cultural norms is in part a function of courts having to maintain some minimum level of perceived legitimacy with the public.

If laws can just change without a new law modifing it then you will never know if you are following the law.

Or if people in power are following the law.

You can't ever just read the law and know what it means, because law, unlike a formal system, is written in natural language (a semantically open system) and interacts with the real world, so it requires non-trivial interpretation.

To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law.

Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.

I guess if that is what you mean than I would generally agree with you.

The way I interpreted your post was that you were saying a law should just be changed by the whims of the populace without a proper process in place.

In our case, the whims of the populace are mediated by judges, whose consideration for popular feeling is often limited to something like 'will there be uncontrollable riots if I rule a certain way', and balanced against their ideological views (about how to interpret law) and the content of the law.

But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.

On the contrary it is a terrible awful thing, and a fantastic indicator of a poorly designed law.

Laws should not impose morality.

All laws are about morality (except for those in science and maths).

We often pretend they are different, or draw a distinction between behaviour constrained by laws and that constrained by personal morals, however the question of what laws to create and how they should be formulated are moral questions.

Some laws are about settling convention where the specific content of the convention has no normative component, e.g., which side of the road cars drive on

Some of the specific content of the law is arbitrary yes, but the fact we have a law about which side people should drive on at all is motivated by a moral imperative.

Although actually neither the right or left hand side rules are arbitrary. They were each intended to better serve a moral objective.

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-dri...

They do serve a normative aim, i.e., 'we should have drivable two-way roads', yes.

I'm not sure we need to reduce all norms to 'morality'. But if we think of morality in a really broad way, like 'humans (or other sapient creatures) seeking to satisfy preferences or impose additional structure on nature or society for their own purposes in a universalizable/principled (i.e., fair) way', then definitely: laws should always be motivated in some way by morality.

That's different from the claim (which I'm not saying you've made) that this relationship means that laws should always simply 'encode' moral norms in some direct sense, which imo is a common (and mistaken) simplification.

But yeah I think we're on the same page.

So we should get rid of laws against murder, rape, theft, etc? Some people do not believe those things are immoral. That means when we create laws banning them we are imposing our morality onto others.

you take the reply you got back from a the judge and send it to sympathetic media to get public eyes on a judge abusing the law for their social goals. There’s no other way to fight against corrupt officials when the system is corrupt.

What if the only sympathetic media is decried as bigoted or [insert-your-favorite-whatever-ist] as a result (or is already known as such)? Then it stops being "corruption" and is seen as heroic.

Contact https://www.fairforall.org and let them handle the PR component.

If your case is that the judicial system and the media as a whole won't touch your issue (and the outlets that will are decried by society as being bigoted) maybe, just maybe, you're the one who is wrong and the entire rest of society is correct.

It isn't the entire rest of society, it is a very small privileged group pushing this. A majority of men strongly disagrees with these things, but their voices aren't allowed to be heard.

What sympathetic media? There are none, except maybe for Breitbart?

Look at what happened with James Damore. His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed, so they simply invented it, claiming his memo said women programmers are worse at it than men when it said no such thing. Media blanketed the news with this false claim even though the document was public and anyone could download and read it for themselves. The only news outlet I saw cover this story correctly was Breitbart, who also ended up as a result with lots of leaked screenshots from disaffected Googlers talking about internal racial and sexual discrimination against "white" (+Asian) men.

> His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed

That's...not how at-will employment works.

Needed to justify the termination on ethical grounds, not legal. I thought that was obvious from context.

I don't think Damore would have been bad with women, I believe his attempts were genuine for that matter. They way he handled publication was probably too much for the company and surely for a certain public out for blood. For any public statement you need the message to be easily digestible.

He never published anything publicly. His essay was written internally and then deliberately leaked by the sort of people who want to punish any ideological dissent. And it worked: the leakers were it seems never found, and Damore was fired, despite that his essay was written in response to a diversity training workshop asking for feedback.

So you’re saying his opponents leaked it to sympathetic media?

Media, including big tech, is not sympathetic of men's issues. This is because male users are worth significantly less as advertisement targets, they would rather lose 3 male users over 1 female user. Its just pure capitalism and not inherent bias, but still it means that you wont find any media that cares much about your issues because they would rather not alienate their lucrative female users.

Yes. That's exactly what happened.

> This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.

I hope this comes up when she's up for reelection.

> The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.

Literally millions of men have died to save women and children from Titanic times, or in wars, if not still (just look at all the construction, electrical, mining jobs where there's no regard for "diversity" or lost lives)... Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? :eyeroll:

Which country?

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