7 ms·

I argued with a family member about this just the other day. She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive o

I argued with a family member about this just the other day. She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter. I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work? The answers of her and her friends bounced between "I don't care what happens to racists like him" and calling me a racist for "defending" him. One participant said that he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us." As if there's a cap on how much money racists are allowed to make. I read everything he said that offended people, and I didn't see anything racist, as far as I can tell, he just hates protesters and "PC" culture. I just can't shake the first 3 words of The Constitution from my thoughts lately. Very nice of the LA Times to include a picture of it at the top of the page. We are not two separate entities in this country, the government and the NOT government. We are all The People. And we should all uphold the rights guaranteed in The Constitution to all of our fellow citizens. Shoutout to Paul Grahams ever applicable "What You Can't Say" http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

nonsince 6y ago
People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account. I can't speak for this exact case, because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence. If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense. When you have such a significant power over someone's higher education and therefore their life earnings, I don't think it's unfair to scrutinise these people's views further than had they little structural power.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- finder83 6y ago
  I disagree and think that we need more nuance in our speech and understanding, not less. There are a lot of moral issues you just listed, from violent vs peaceful protesting, the limit of authority with police, black lives matter, free speech, and race. And you summed it all up with if someone disagrees with any of those that they are racist or regressive. But there are a lot of complexities and nuances to each one of those moral issues. Each one really needs a discussion. Even just separating out BLM, there is the core moral anti-racist belief behind the statement (which I think most people would agree with), but there is also the political association affiliated with the Democratic party that in their belief statement supports abortion, transgenderism, and many other issues that are still at contention in our country. Talking with many of my conservative friends, they have no issue with the race movement of BLM but will not align themselves with a political organization that supports abortion, particularly as they see it as a genocide targeted primarily at inner-city blacks. Again, we need more nuance, not less. We're already polarized enough. One issue is that peoples' views are not being scrutinized, they're being thrown into a bucket of "racist" and cancelled. Any time a straw man is used to silence a group of people based on mass categorization, it's contributing to division and not unity. These issues, and politics in particular, are and should be complex.
- lr4444lr 6y ago
  Okay, so you can check their academic CV and ask for colleague references. Quite another to ruin their professional career for a personal view on Twitter that isn't about planting bombs in black churches, or the like.
- whiddershins 6y ago
  You are trying to say you can infer racism, and you need to do that to identify the racists because they won’t speak their racism openly? Can you see how that is a recipe for attacking people and ruining their lives based on something that in the end might be imagined? Do you see how easily that becomes ... anyone who disagrees with any opinion I have is evil?
raxxorrax 6y ago
The thing is that these groups (yeah, yeah, always with the generalizations) preach empathy but have no trouble to get people fired, their families too if possible. I think they behave this way because of pressure from social media and racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink. Maybe that is too harsh on them in contrast of people just flaming random people by random characteristics, but they do have real institutional support.
- sojournerc 6y ago
  > racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink. Reminds me of the 10 minute hate from 1984, which was also intended for catharsis not outward justice or remedy.
  - scoutt 6y ago
    VERY interesting analogy! Never thought about it this way.
gwd 6y ago
> I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work? As someone who's a devout Christian, it's quite interesting to me to see how the same anti-patterns which plague zealous religious movements -- intolerance, judgementalism, lack of an avenue for repentance / rehabilitation, unquestionable dogmas, inquisitions to root out heresies, factionalism, etc -- plague the progressive movement as well. "So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." - The Apostle Paul
- ngngngng 6y ago
  We're certainly witnessing a religion. Just one without mercy, repentance, or atonement.
- dcsilver 6y ago
  So true. Far too many people today, many of whom I suspect have a recent inclination to harboring particular political views at all, are missing the entire point of politics - that it's a debate. It's the great debate, the one that we set up entire electoral systems to have, and built entire buildings in which it would be held. Today, a dangerous number of people are outright enraged by having their dogmatic political beliefs challenged, and they'll go to great lengths to ensure that you can't share yours. It's a mess. Years ago, attempts at political conversation were more often than not met with indifference and you had to find like-minded people interested in having them. We used to bemoan that too few people were engaged in politics. Who knew that it would be this much of a mess once they were.
  - geodel 6y ago
    I am not surprised by this at all. Somewhere I read that 'The more strict the scriptures, the more interpretation is magnanimous and compassionate' And 'the more liberal the written text, interpretation will be very strict' Whenever I hear term 'climate denier' not even 'climate change denier' I know speaker is stewing in his own superiority and least bothered about actual improvement.
daffy 6y ago
I'm curious, what exactly did he say?
goatinaboat 6y ago
She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter. The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.
- blub 6y ago
  I saw a large thread on a subreddit about music asking others to boycott a specific store because the CEO made a campaign donation to Trump. Several people sounded like they were actual customers... But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    I see things like this all the time on Facebook. It’s quite annoying. One that was circulating was for boycotting anything Peter Thiel had significant involvement in because he is a major donor to Trump. Not much of a surprise but Theil is either a board member or has invested in many companies... So, the list was large and purely virtue signaling. It had other major donors on it too. I don’t know if this cancel culture really works for large companies. Most companies have taken money or have board members or high level employees that are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. (With some of both sides who have donated heavily to political campaigns...)
Balgair 6y ago
> She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired ... > ... he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us." How much do they think PIs make anyways? It depends on school, but adjuncts only make ~$1250/credit and typically have no health insurance [0]. They all have side gigs to make ends meet. [0] https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.html https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.ht...
shorts_theory 6y ago
This is something which I have become more aware of after reading "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. I am now wary of posting any thoughts online which go against the tide of popular opinion. One of my takeaways from that book was that the cost of saying anything controversial online can be limitless. It's scary how mob "justice" and the rampant virtue signalling these days can ruin lives and careers. It's not just governments policing speech: the public is just as guilty.
sesuximo 6y ago
Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve been Publicly Shamed” touches on this. Less from the angle of PC culture and more about anger on Twitter. I think it’s a good book and interesting even if you disagree with the conclusions.
Chris2048 6y ago
I recently read a story (AITAH) where a persona who worked as a university professor (a neighbour) was throwing branches into someones back yard and trespassing (to smoke). After the police didn't do anything, they contacted their work (the university) and later considered social messages of the form "University professor did <this>". I was fairly uncomfortable with this; I feel these kind of things need to be handles by e.g. courts or similar, not in via social pinion where a persons profession is leveraged against them. I also dislike arguments of the form "If they believe <this> how can they treat <some demographic> fairly", or even "People of <some demographic> will feel uncomfortable working with them"; but I accept they have some validity. I feel a true answer is more complicated; i.e. before we answer these problems, we consider: - is someone not know to express racist opinions therefore not racist? - what political-compatibility criteria is needed to work with someone? - if person A doesn't want to work with person B; is that persons As problem, or person Bs? - how objective are hiring/firing/promotion criteria? to the extent that they are subjective, what goes into that, and what is fair? Are promotions fair if they are random, so long as they are not biased wrt race/sex/etc? Or is a random process unfair because it is arbitrary? If it is biased towards arbitrary criteria that is not the usual demographics (e.g. ppl who wear glasses) is this fair? - what moral obligation do employees have in their private lives? Does this obligation differ by job type? Do all jobs have obligations e.g. do corp contracts imply them too; and are employees compensated wrt these obligations?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Sarah_Giggs 6y ago
The issue isn't necessarily that he doesn't deserve to have a job, but he certainly doesn't deserve to take advantage of what is demonstrably a position of power and influence over others to spread hate in a public forum. Freedom of speech is treated as this unassailable privilege in any arena but if the speech in question is, for example, a violent fatwa calling for the death of an author, as in the case of Salman Rushdie, I think it's entirely justified for a public forum to suppress that. Let those who want to spread violent or damaging ideas find a private platform for it and leave it to them to find an audience.

nonsince 6y ago

People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account. I can't speak for this exact case, because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence. If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense. When you have such a significant power over someone's higher education and therefore their life earnings, I don't think it's unfair to scrutinise these people's views further than had they little structural power.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
finder83 6y ago
I disagree and think that we need more nuance in our speech and understanding, not less. There are a lot of moral issues you just listed, from violent vs peaceful protesting, the limit of authority with police, black lives matter, free speech, and race. And you summed it all up with if someone disagrees with any of those that they are racist or regressive. But there are a lot of complexities and nuances to each one of those moral issues. Each one really needs a discussion. Even just separating out BLM, there is the core moral anti-racist belief behind the statement (which I think most people would agree with), but there is also the political association affiliated with the Democratic party that in their belief statement supports abortion, transgenderism, and many other issues that are still at contention in our country. Talking with many of my conservative friends, they have no issue with the race movement of BLM but will not align themselves with a political organization that supports abortion, particularly as they see it as a genocide targeted primarily at inner-city blacks. Again, we need more nuance, not less. We're already polarized enough. One issue is that peoples' views are not being scrutinized, they're being thrown into a bucket of "racist" and cancelled. Any time a straw man is used to silence a group of people based on mass categorization, it's contributing to division and not unity. These issues, and politics in particular, are and should be complex.
lr4444lr 6y ago
Okay, so you can check their academic CV and ask for colleague references. Quite another to ruin their professional career for a personal view on Twitter that isn't about planting bombs in black churches, or the like.
whiddershins 6y ago
You are trying to say you can infer racism, and you need to do that to identify the racists because they won’t speak their racism openly? Can you see how that is a recipe for attacking people and ruining their lives based on something that in the end might be imagined? Do you see how easily that becomes ... anyone who disagrees with any opinion I have is evil?

raxxorrax 6y ago

The thing is that these groups (yeah, yeah, always with the generalizations) preach empathy but have no trouble to get people fired, their families too if possible. I think they behave this way because of pressure from social media and racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink. Maybe that is too harsh on them in contrast of people just flaming random people by random characteristics, but they do have real institutional support.

sojournerc 6y ago
> racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink. Reminds me of the 10 minute hate from 1984, which was also intended for catharsis not outward justice or remedy.
- scoutt 6y ago
  VERY interesting analogy! Never thought about it this way.

gwd 6y ago

> I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work? As someone who's a devout Christian, it's quite interesting to me to see how the same anti-patterns which plague zealous religious movements -- intolerance, judgementalism, lack of an avenue for repentance / rehabilitation, unquestionable dogmas, inquisitions to root out heresies, factionalism, etc -- plague the progressive movement as well. "So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." - The Apostle Paul

ngngngng 6y ago
We're certainly witnessing a religion. Just one without mercy, repentance, or atonement.
dcsilver 6y ago
So true. Far too many people today, many of whom I suspect have a recent inclination to harboring particular political views at all, are missing the entire point of politics - that it's a debate. It's the great debate, the one that we set up entire electoral systems to have, and built entire buildings in which it would be held. Today, a dangerous number of people are outright enraged by having their dogmatic political beliefs challenged, and they'll go to great lengths to ensure that you can't share yours. It's a mess. Years ago, attempts at political conversation were more often than not met with indifference and you had to find like-minded people interested in having them. We used to bemoan that too few people were engaged in politics. Who knew that it would be this much of a mess once they were.
- geodel 6y ago
  I am not surprised by this at all. Somewhere I read that 'The more strict the scriptures, the more interpretation is magnanimous and compassionate' And 'the more liberal the written text, interpretation will be very strict' Whenever I hear term 'climate denier' not even 'climate change denier' I know speaker is stewing in his own superiority and least bothered about actual improvement.

daffy 6y ago

I'm curious, what exactly did he say?

goatinaboat 6y ago

She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter. The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.

blub 6y ago
I saw a large thread on a subreddit about music asking others to boycott a specific store because the CEO made a campaign donation to Trump. Several people sounded like they were actual customers... But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.
- bradlys 6y ago
  I see things like this all the time on Facebook. It’s quite annoying. One that was circulating was for boycotting anything Peter Thiel had significant involvement in because he is a major donor to Trump. Not much of a surprise but Theil is either a board member or has invested in many companies... So, the list was large and purely virtue signaling. It had other major donors on it too. I don’t know if this cancel culture really works for large companies. Most companies have taken money or have board members or high level employees that are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. (With some of both sides who have donated heavily to political campaigns...)

Balgair 6y ago

> She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired ... > ... he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us." How much do they think PIs make anyways? It depends on school, but adjuncts only make ~$1250/credit and typically have no health insurance [0]. They all have side gigs to make ends meet. [0] https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.html https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.ht...

shorts_theory 6y ago

This is something which I have become more aware of after reading "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. I am now wary of posting any thoughts online which go against the tide of popular opinion. One of my takeaways from that book was that the cost of saying anything controversial online can be limitless. It's scary how mob "justice" and the rampant virtue signalling these days can ruin lives and careers. It's not just governments policing speech: the public is just as guilty.

sesuximo 6y ago

Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve been Publicly Shamed” touches on this. Less from the angle of PC culture and more about anger on Twitter. I think it’s a good book and interesting even if you disagree with the conclusions.

Chris2048 6y ago

I recently read a story (AITAH) where a persona who worked as a university professor (a neighbour) was throwing branches into someones back yard and trespassing (to smoke). After the police didn't do anything, they contacted their work (the university) and later considered social messages of the form "University professor did <this>". I was fairly uncomfortable with this; I feel these kind of things need to be handles by e.g. courts or similar, not in via social pinion where a persons profession is leveraged against them. I also dislike arguments of the form "If they believe <this> how can they treat <some demographic> fairly", or even "People of <some demographic> will feel uncomfortable working with them"; but I accept they have some validity. I feel a true answer is more complicated; i.e. before we answer these problems, we consider: - is someone not know to express racist opinions therefore not racist? - what political-compatibility criteria is needed to work with someone? - if person A doesn't want to work with person B; is that persons As problem, or person Bs? - how objective are hiring/firing/promotion criteria? to the extent that they are subjective, what goes into that, and what is fair? Are promotions fair if they are random, so long as they are not biased wrt race/sex/etc? Or is a random process unfair because it is arbitrary? If it is biased towards arbitrary criteria that is not the usual demographics (e.g. ppl who wear glasses) is this fair? - what moral obligation do employees have in their private lives? Does this obligation differ by job type? Do all jobs have obligations e.g. do corp contracts imply them too; and are employees compensated wrt these obligations?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Sarah_Giggs 6y ago

The issue isn't necessarily that he doesn't deserve to have a job, but he certainly doesn't deserve to take advantage of what is demonstrably a position of power and influence over others to spread hate in a public forum. Freedom of speech is treated as this unassailable privilege in any arena but if the speech in question is, for example, a violent fatwa calling for the death of an author, as in the case of Salman Rushdie, I think it's entirely justified for a public forum to suppress that. Let those who want to spread violent or damaging ideas find a private platform for it and leave it to them to find an audience.