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Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the en
by mikeash 7y ago
Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the end of the day.
Millions of workers labor under threat of starvation just for standing up for themselves a little bit. Expressing a straightforward opinion like “it is illegal to work off the clock” or “a 30 minute lunch break is mandatory in this state” can be enough to provoke retaliation.
Why are people so eager to spend so much energy defending a guy who, at the very least, wrote a bunch of inappropriate things in a completely inappropriate place?
What’s the slippery slope here? “If a man can’t rant about the unfairness of statutory rape laws on a computer science mailing list, then....” I don’t know how that sentence is supposed to end.
There are so many more important things to worry about. A kook is losing his platform. He’ll have to shout into the void like the rest of us. Oh, the horror!
- aazaa 7y ago> What’s the slippery slope here? The slippery slope is that today RMS is the kook, ejected without due process or objective standards. Tomorrow, you'll be the kook.
- loeg 7y agoThat's not, like, how arguments work? You don't just get to say "it's a slippery slope, it'll expand to include you, Q.E.D."
- selestify 7y agoParent asked what the slippery slope argument to be had here was, and aazaa responded with the answer to that question. Why are you confused?
- journalctl 7y agoI don’t know. I don’t say gross things about women and I still manage to have a job.
- mikeash 7y agoI could already be fired for far less important reasons. Where’s the slope?
- nkurz 7y agoI think the purported slope is that currently you can be fired at the whim of your boss (who presumably knows you well), but in the future you might be fired at the whim of a blogger (who has never met you). You have only one boss to keep happy, which is stressful but substantially under your control. Giving equivalent power to myriad bloggers scares people because there is less accountability and more possibility of false accusations.