On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez (2021-05-14)
Guy got fired from Apple yesterday for something he wrote in a book 5 years ago. The book was a bestseller, and it was an NPR book of the year. Article explains how the activists who got him fired took one quote out of context.
The article seems really biased. It is implying there is just one quote, and it was taken out of context.
The article links another article which links another article which has the full text of the letter.
The letter includes multiple quotes from the book, and actually does include the full context of the quote in question, about which it says the following:
We tried to contextualize the above quote further with additional text from his book, but there was no context that made the language used and views expressed acceptable. In fact, the additional context opened our eyes to some of Mr. GarcĂa MartĂnez’s other problematic views — none of which he has disclaimed since Chaos Monkeys was published:
Here is another example. This is a quote from the article:
“Given Mr. GarcĂa MartĂnez’s history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks,” the letter read, “we are concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.” All of this without even a hint that there’s ever been anything like such a problem at any of his workplaces.
This is the actual quote from the letter:
Given Mr. GarcĂa MartĂnez’s history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks about his former colleagues, we are concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.
The article just omits the words “about his former colleagues” from the quoted text, and then goes on to say that the letter doesn’t even give a hint that there’s ever been a problem at his workplaces!!!
I had a pre-existing negative view of Taibbi as a biased, partisan jerk, based on reading a handful of things of his over the years. This selective quotation shows that he’s intelligent and knows what he’s doing in crafting purposeful attacks against his targets - you don’t make edits like that by accident. So in addition to being a biased, partisan jerk, which would be bad enough on its own, he’s also directing his intelligence and effort towards crafting misleading narratives that violate basic principles of integrity that any author should follow.