> So you think he wrote the memo in bad faith and/or ignorance. Just say that. Why argue that it says things it doesn't?

This is the "only the literal words should be taken" argument - but words can have contextual meanings above and beyond their literal meanings.

"Urban crime", for example, literally just means "crime in an urban environment" but is often used as a dogwhistle for "crimes committed by POC".

Same with Damore's memo - he may not literally have said the things people are seeing but - if you assume it was written in bad faith (which the pseudoscience and "I'm just asking the questions" would indicate) - the dogwhistles are clear.

> So you think he wrote the memo in bad faith and/or ignorance

By now I'm convinced he wrote the memo in bad faith. The moment he beelined to every alt-right media outlet wearing a "Goolag" t-shirt it was clear this wasn't just an honest mistake. Even an idiot would understand that writing a memo setting up a "left vs. right" argument and then attacking Googlers as "repressors misguided by leftist ideals", while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly.

It's no coincidence that he admittedly kept pushing this around when it got ignored until it eventually "made it to the public." Had he really wanted to have an honest discussion with HR about practices, he could've emailed them directly. Then he sued immediately after getting fired. Very tight timeline for a well-intentioned snafu.

> Why argue that it says things it doesn't?

Where did I do that?

> At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.

At least be honest about the actual content of the memo. The additional context and inferences are just fluff to mask the base premise: "women are biologically different, that means they probably don't want to work here, please stop trying reaching out to them, you are discriminating against everyone else."

The article I linked lists some of the issues. Essentially the study could be measuring for a number of things instead of gender aptitude for "liking things instead of people." But that's besides the point, even if the study was correct jumping from "newborn males are slightly more likely to stare at a mobile longer" to "that means adult women are less interested in computer sciences" is preposterous. Even further, jumping from that to "hence trying to be more inclusive in hiring is discrimination against males" is just the kind of shit I'd expect from alt-right writers, not engineers. But then again, Damore was very quick to jump on that train, so maybe he had a ticket already.