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> Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory? You have cha
by eesmith 6y ago
> Do you believe that someone should never be able to hold a job again because they donated money to a politician that an employee finds unsavory?
You have changed the goalposts, because 1) "someone" is a much broader category than CEO, and 2) "an employee" is much narrower than "many employees, a board member, and external supporters."
> I like the idea of due process
Due process has never applied to employment positions. Ever.
> There is no proof he acted against the interests of LGBT employees at Mozilla
You mean against their employment interest. He did help fund opposition to their personal interests.
> We can't force them all to be jobless homeless. That's totalitarian.
Funny thing is, Eich is neither jobless nor homeless, and people still hear about him. Wikipedia summarizes his few on masks, for example, and his work on Brave regularly appears on HN.
John Stuart Mill described it much better than I in "On Liberty":
"""We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. """
> an employees personal feelings
Multiple employees, and volunteers. And at least one board member.
Certainly personal feelings are important. People are turned down all the time for a position because of "bad culture fit" or "rubs me wrong" or any number of personal reasons.
The fact and reality is that we are all emotional creatures. You cannot separate them.
But now that we're well off track - what does "cancel" mean?
Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"?
- Veen 6y ago> Because I've looked and looked, and never found a definition which fits better than "rich, powerful, or famous people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that liberals disagree with"? Consider how you might think differently if it were people facing unwanted negative consequences of actions or expressions that conservatives disagreed with.
- eesmith 6y agoThat happens all the time. It's just not called being canceled. When CPAC de-platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and Young Pharaoh, weren't they being canceled? Yet I have no problem with them doing that. Whenever I try to come up with a non-partisan definition of "cancel" - one that doesn't explicitly point to "liberals" or "left" - I easily discover that of course conservatives also cancel. Because facing negative consequences of actions or expressions is part of human nature. Now, of course there are times when I think that the "canceling" was wrong. If someone loses their job because of their support for unionizing, or faces pressure to suppress reporting sexual harassment, then that's both canceling and illegal, and I am definitely against both cases. My problem is that "cancel" seems to have a built-in anti-left bias, making it simply a proxy for "leftists should stop complaining."
- salawat 6y agoIt absolutely doesn't have a built in anti-left bias. Who do you think were canceling in the 80's? (The Right) The point is, there is always someone trying to push things one way or another, and up until about 20 years ago, it seemed like things always found their way to an equilibrium... My how things have changed.
- eesmith 6y agoIf you can't give a definition of "cancel" then how do you tell there was an equilibrium or that there isn't a built-in anti-left bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture gives example definitions: "to stop giving support to that person" That happens all the time. My Senator consistently voted in ways I don't like, so I'm voting for someone else next election and not contributing to his election campaign = stop giving support = cancel? Yet, entirely acceptable. "withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive" You'll note that "public figures and companies" has the built-in bias to the rich, powerful, and famous I mentioned - minimum-wage service employees cannot be canceled, according to this definition. You'll also notice a long history of, say, the NRA withdrawing support from a politician after that politician support gun sale restrictions. And what happened to Kaepernick in the NFL is surely an example of cancelling, yes? That is, both definitions are so broad that, when stripped of its specific anti-left bias, becomes no different than what John Stuart Mill says we should expect from liberty, and may even be our duty.