Tone-deaf means 'jarring to the dominant cultural discourse'. Whether or not you think the dominant cultural discourse could benefit from jarring entirely depends on what it is.
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My mother was tone-deaf when she posted memos at her workplace saying that women should be allowed to take accountancy exams. Was she right or wrong? Her 'tone-deafness' doesn't tell us that. We need an ethical argument on the issues.
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So, if James Damore was tone-deaf to bring biological gender-differences into a discussion of diversity issues, this does not mean he was also wrong. The question is '*Is* this acceptable as part of the discussion?' I would argue that it is.
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In that case, the problem would not be the tone-deafness of the person challenging the expectations of his workplace but that the workplace had the expectation that its cultural/political norms would not be challenged.
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Nevertheless, some people who are all for disrupting hegemonic cultural norms and dominant discourses in some circumstances suddenly discover a new-found respect for authority and convention when the dominant views are their own.
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I have just finished reading a paper which looked at the way trans people who were also trans activists went about disrupting the norms and expectations at their workplace. There was much approval & no mention of tone-deafness.
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That is a good thing, I think, although it could get rather tiresome if you're just trying to do your job and your colleagues keep deconstructing gender binaries all over the place. Much better to do so in, say, a memo.
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Hypocritically, isn't it the left/SJWs that always complain when people "tone police"? So why should Damore's tone matter rather than the content of his arguments coupled with the data which support them.
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This is only an argument when you're talking about whether it was a surprise that he was fired or not. It does not touch on the ethics or legality of him creating the memo and his consecutive firing, it merely explains why things happened the way they did after the memo.
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“tone deaf” is an indication that the person using the phrase wants to hear something different and thinks making it sound faux-intellectual gives the desire heft
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