11 ms·

Not necessarily. There are already basic protections in place. For example, it would be expressly illegal for a workplace to fire you for being a satanist. I

by axaxs 5y ago

Not necessarily. There are already basic protections in place. For example, it would be expressly illegal for a workplace to fire you for being a satanist. I don't see a problem with extending such protections to include more free speech. The problem is, where does one draw the line? If one is against abortion and protests that, seems different than say if one is a full fledged neonazi spewing rhetoric. The way it sits today, the majority of people are afraid to speak their thoughts for fear of workplace retaliation. This is effectively corporate controlled speech, which is not a good thing for society.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
newacct583 5y ago
> There are already basic protections in place. For example, it would be expressly illegal for a workplace to fire you for being a satanist. That's not "basic protections", it's existing case law about a conflict within the constitution. Freedom of religion and freedom of association are both protected, but where they conflict we generally find that whichever side is providing some kind of good to the public (be it products or employment) needs to bend. You can't fire me for my religion because of the nature of "firing" (being something that denies me something most people have), not "religion". It can't be extended without stepping on some other right-holder's toes.
- axaxs 5y ago
  Sure, but it's worth considering whether we should care about stepping on the right-holder's toes. That's what got us into corporate controlled speech, doxing, and twitter mobs in the first place. Read, people wouldn't do it if it weren't effective. It probably wouldn't be -as- bad if in the US healthcare wasn't tied to employment. As it sits today, speaking your mind can literally be a death sentence, if you happen to say something a mob doesn't agree with.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    > As it sits today, speaking your mind can literally be a death sentence, if you happen to say something a mob doesn't agree with. Ridiculous hyperbole. First, because it imagines that people get killed for tweets, and second because it hilariously invokes the idea that this is a new thing. You genuinely don't think people have been persecuted for opinions in the past? Let me get my dead buddy Galileo to drop a few rocks on your head. Likewise McCarthyism, etc... Objectively free expression of inconvenient conservative ideas in the US has never been cheaper, freer, easier or more pervasive than it is RIGHT NOW. Good grief, just look at your own posts. You don't look like someone afraid of being killed by a mob.
    - axaxs 5y ago
      I certainly didn't mean to offend you, or to pretend things today are worse than at any point in the past. It was more an argument against this weird celebration of getting people fired. I mean, there's even a subreddit called ByeByeJob. Just pointing out it's not so simple as 'hur hur he got fired.' Imagine you just found out you got cancer, and had a public meltdown on the way home that someone happened to film. Somewhere people would be laughing at you, while others are trying to get you fired, and poof there goes your health insurance. Crazy world.
      - watwut 5y ago
        That is exactly what happened to gays and lesbians and single moms in conservative places. That is what happens to anyone with history of sex work. There is actual organization right know to collect wrong thing said by liberal professors and to try them get fired. The abortion clinic volunteers that go with you so that you are not yelled at alone are a thing for a reason. And in civil rights era, white who did not supported segregation was economically punished and had hard time to find job.
        Fern_Blossom 5y ago
        I mean... is what you said advocation to keep this cycle going? That's where whataboutism leads to. Justification to just swing the pendulum the other direction. I don't agree with any of it happening to either side of the political spectrum. At some point the shit has to stop.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Specifically, one cannot be fired for being a satanist because of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Constitution is completely silent on the interaction of corporations and the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights; those rights describe a relationship between the people and the government. Within that framework, government crafts law that determines how business may legally operate. Congress made a specific choice to extend (part of) a protection similar to the one described in the First Amendment to employees. It is not a complete extension; for example, at the federal level, freedom of association is not protected regarding one's business relationships, and you can be fired in most states for being a member of the KKK (there are some specific states that have added additional protections for political activities or political beliefs that would preclude such a firing). And most of the rights in the Bill of Rights aren't extended at all to the employer-employee relationship; employers may demand employees (and customers, for that matter) bear no arms on their premises, for example.
akomtu 5y ago
I find it entertaining that in our society, a dude wearing a t-shirt with an upside down pentagram would be protected by the tree speech amendment, while a dude with a t-shirt saying that there are only two genders would be fired on the spot and blacklisted in all major organizations. Our free speech laws are very selective.
- filoleg 5y ago
  >a dude wearing a t-shirt with an upside down pentagram would be protected by the tree speech amendment, while a dude with a t-shirt saying that there are only two genders would be fired on the spot and blacklisted in all major organizations. Probably because one of those two is a religious statement, while another one is a political statement. Which makes sense, given that religious affiliation is a protected group when it comes to employment, while political affiliation/speech typically isn't.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    In other words, if you were a judge and we're presented with a range of offenders wearing tshirts with "two genders", "satan church", "flat earth" and "vaccine hoax" logos, you'd selectively label them as political, religious, unscientific and "dangerous disinformation" and issue sentences accordingly? If that's the case, this isn't different from how the inquisition operated long ago, except that they would praise the flat earth and two genders guys, and execute on the spot the satan worshipper. Freedom of speech is about protecting all viewpoints, including the ones you don't like and even the ones you deem offensive.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      > if you were a judge and we're presented with a range of offenders wearing tshirts with "two genders", "satan church", "flat earth" and "vaccine hoax" logos, you'd selectively label them as political, religious, unscientific and "dangerous disinformation" and issue sentences accordingly? No, I would label them all as "political" except the satan church one. Because the satan church tshirt you mentioned doesn't make any kind of a statement aside from signaling belonging to or support of a religious group. However, if the satan church tshirt made an additional statement (after "satan church") like "abortions should be legal", I would count it as a political statement as well. "Flat earth" is just as much of a political statement as "Spherical earth" is (science and validity aside). You can get fired for either without much legal repercussions for the employer. Whether you get fired or not for wearing that tshirt is fully up to how your boss feels about it. To put it simply, "protected class/speech" doesn't mean that you can wrap any statement inside of it and you are protected from getting fired. Especially if that statement you wrapped inside goes directly against another protected class (e.g., if you had a christian church tshirt that said "islam is a fake religion"), then I bet you are gonna get fired extremely fast, and saying "religion is a protected class" won't help you much there.
EGreg 5y ago
Basically, the difference is whether the US government can compel private organizations to give a platform to someone. The idea of "incorporating" the Bill of Rights against states and cities is a result of the Due Process clause of the 14th amendment. (For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the Heller decision would eventually result in US cities like NYC, SF and LA being unable to require gun licenses anymore, after someone sues them like in MacDonald vs Chicago). That said, Facebook and Twitter are not publicly owned, they are "private" corporations (which are publicly traded). The problem isn't their specific decisions, but that they are too big. The Sherman Antitrust act actually gave a lot of teeth to the idea that the public government can break up businesses if they abuse their monopoly power (and supported even by Republican presidents like Teddy Roosevelt). Ma Bell. Standard Oil. Etc. Today, people look at Facebook and Google as targets for breaking them up into competing companies or unbundling their departments from favoring one another. As a left-libertarian, I would instead like to subsidize open-source software to disrupt these Big Tech monopolies from the ground up. And it's a subtle point, but I would like for the State to simply pass laws explicitly declining to enforce property rights and other rights of entities that "control too much". Landlords who own too many houses, or banks that merge together into large conglomerates will be put on notice that the public system will not enforce their rights against members of the public, past a certain point. It doesn't serve society for private property to have no limits, similarly to how you can't scale up Roman era ships and still have them seaworthy. I recently gave an interview at Glasgow Caledonian University about the economics of free speech, where I go into detail about the problems and solutions in all the aspects around Capitalism and Free Speech, from money in politics, to deplatforming, to Big Tech filter bubbles, to clickbait news, to the Sinclair television chorus. It contains a lot of critiques of Capitalism and Competition as the basis for free speech. If anyone has about 30 minutes to listen through it, I would love your feedback: https://youtu.be/M8HbvC6vqIY https://youtu.be/M8HbvC6vqIY
pessimizer 5y ago
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech, and everything to do with workers' rights. You can't be fired for belonging to a protected class, but you can be fired for literally anything else - hence people are still rarely punished for firing members of a protected class. There was an upheld case a few years ago where a man fired one of his employees for being too sexy. Not acting too sexy, or dressing too sexy, but being too sexy. You can fire someone for wearing Adidas, or for breathing too loudly (unless it can be shown to be the effect of a disability.) The idea that we should have special rules for racists and sexists is an insult. It would be in effect creating a protected class for bigots, who could still be fired for wearing green on Thursday. The most absurd part of this is that the vast majority of the people decrying "cancel culture" are the most antagonistic to any normalization of worker's rights, or enforcement of minority protections. Apparently, the only real racism is when you call someone a racist.
- axaxs 5y ago
  Good points all around. Since work is so vital to our everyday survival, and as pointed out, often health insurance, it should be much harder or with much better reason to fire someone than what currently exists today(which, in most states is nothing). I by no means intended to advocate for chiseling out special protections for bigots or antagonists.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    I'll admit to a little frustration with people who act like current law (usually the first amendment) protects people from "cancellation" by private actors. But I'm more open to arguments that we should create new employment law that makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people. I don't think this is a good idea, for the record, but it is a reasonable argument to make. Many other countries have much stronger worker protections, which work well for them. I don't personally think they would fit with all the other interlocking policies in the US, but it's definitely not a crazy thing to discuss. But it's also not the case that it's a first amendment issue.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
Balgair 5y ago
> The problem is, where does one draw the line? The article goes into one of the possible problems: cyberbullying. Especially with young women, cyberbullying is a bit of a problem. Though the people involved in this case are not involved with cyberbullying, it's not difficult to jump to that issue with the people involved. Though it depends on local laws, schools often have the mandate to stop bullying and other such behaviors. Courts have been mixed thus far on how cyberbullying is legalistically different than regular bullying and where the mandates/responsibilities (if they exist) start and end for the school administration, especially with mixed minor-adult populations. It is, admittedly, a very difficult line to draw. As the article states, SCOTUS rarely gets into school-student speech issues, so this decision is expected to set the stage for the next 25-50 years of US policy in the now digital era EDIT: It's not just young women, cyberbullying is more of an universal problem.
- tomp 5y ago
  If cyber-bullying is really that problematic, it should be a crime. Schools aren’t called to solve crime; they should defer to the police.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    I'm confused: you say only the police should do something about it, so do you mean that society shouldn't try to prevent bullying, or that the police should run the schools?
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      I assume they mean (and I agree) that society should try to prevent bullying (that is, criminal harrasment) by reporting it to the police, not by engaging in vigilante 'justice', which is what any school discipline for off campus activity (and really, cancel culture in general) amounts to. If you believe your vigilanteism is justified (because, and only because, the police won't or can't do their jobs) the onus is on you to clearly communicate that your actions are because the police won't or can't do their jobs, and to support that assertion with resonable evidence, in every single case.
hodgesrm 5y ago
> The way it sits today, the majority of people are afraid to speak their thoughts for fear of workplace retaliation. I hear this argument regularly. Can you cite evidence showing it's actually true?
- vquantum 5y ago
  Look at this mail from the Python Steering Council: https://marc.info/?l=python-dev&m=161652621725348&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=python-dev&m=161652621725348&w=2 Similar rants from last year have been deleted. Whenever someone posts the evidence you ask for, it is usually flagged instantly. Perhaps that is why evidence is rarely seen.
  - netrus 5y ago
    Well yes, many people will want to say "fuck you" to their boss at some point in time, and will not do so for fear of retaliation. In the example you post, someone is ridiculing a group decision on a sensitive topic. Do you actually think that there should be no negative consequences to _ridiculing_ the decisions of your boss or coworkers? Being a dick has always been a way to lose your job, and I think that's okay.
- axaxs 5y ago
  https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-th... I've read this multiple times over the last couple years. Please don't accuse me of cherry picking, I don't know anything about Cato, I just googled it and it was the first link(well, via thehill).
  - sellyme 5y ago
    Extremely off-topic, but that URL is a great example of why using headline/lede text in links is a bad idea. Really loses its punch when the '%' gets stripped.
  - hodgesrm 5y ago

by axaxs 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

newacct583 5y ago

> There are already basic protections in place. For example, it would be expressly illegal for a workplace to fire you for being a satanist. That's not "basic protections", it's existing case law about a conflict within the constitution. Freedom of religion and freedom of association are both protected, but where they conflict we generally find that whichever side is providing some kind of good to the public (be it products or employment) needs to bend. You can't fire me for my religion because of the nature of "firing" (being something that denies me something most people have), not "religion". It can't be extended without stepping on some other right-holder's toes.

axaxs 5y ago
Sure, but it's worth considering whether we should care about stepping on the right-holder's toes. That's what got us into corporate controlled speech, doxing, and twitter mobs in the first place. Read, people wouldn't do it if it weren't effective. It probably wouldn't be -as- bad if in the US healthcare wasn't tied to employment. As it sits today, speaking your mind can literally be a death sentence, if you happen to say something a mob doesn't agree with.
- newacct583 5y ago
  > As it sits today, speaking your mind can literally be a death sentence, if you happen to say something a mob doesn't agree with. Ridiculous hyperbole. First, because it imagines that people get killed for tweets, and second because it hilariously invokes the idea that this is a new thing. You genuinely don't think people have been persecuted for opinions in the past? Let me get my dead buddy Galileo to drop a few rocks on your head. Likewise McCarthyism, etc... Objectively free expression of inconvenient conservative ideas in the US has never been cheaper, freer, easier or more pervasive than it is RIGHT NOW. Good grief, just look at your own posts. You don't look like someone afraid of being killed by a mob.
  - axaxs 5y ago
    I certainly didn't mean to offend you, or to pretend things today are worse than at any point in the past. It was more an argument against this weird celebration of getting people fired. I mean, there's even a subreddit called ByeByeJob. Just pointing out it's not so simple as 'hur hur he got fired.' Imagine you just found out you got cancer, and had a public meltdown on the way home that someone happened to film. Somewhere people would be laughing at you, while others are trying to get you fired, and poof there goes your health insurance. Crazy world.
    - watwut 5y ago
      That is exactly what happened to gays and lesbians and single moms in conservative places. That is what happens to anyone with history of sex work. There is actual organization right know to collect wrong thing said by liberal professors and to try them get fired. The abortion clinic volunteers that go with you so that you are not yelled at alone are a thing for a reason. And in civil rights era, white who did not supported segregation was economically punished and had hard time to find job.
      - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
        I mean... is what you said advocation to keep this cycle going? That's where whataboutism leads to. Justification to just swing the pendulum the other direction. I don't agree with any of it happening to either side of the political spectrum. At some point the shit has to stop.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Specifically, one cannot be fired for being a satanist because of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Constitution is completely silent on the interaction of corporations and the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights; those rights describe a relationship between the people and the government. Within that framework, government crafts law that determines how business may legally operate. Congress made a specific choice to extend (part of) a protection similar to the one described in the First Amendment to employees. It is not a complete extension; for example, at the federal level, freedom of association is not protected regarding one's business relationships, and you can be fired in most states for being a member of the KKK (there are some specific states that have added additional protections for political activities or political beliefs that would preclude such a firing). And most of the rights in the Bill of Rights aren't extended at all to the employer-employee relationship; employers may demand employees (and customers, for that matter) bear no arms on their premises, for example.

akomtu 5y ago

I find it entertaining that in our society, a dude wearing a t-shirt with an upside down pentagram would be protected by the tree speech amendment, while a dude with a t-shirt saying that there are only two genders would be fired on the spot and blacklisted in all major organizations. Our free speech laws are very selective.

filoleg 5y ago
>a dude wearing a t-shirt with an upside down pentagram would be protected by the tree speech amendment, while a dude with a t-shirt saying that there are only two genders would be fired on the spot and blacklisted in all major organizations. Probably because one of those two is a religious statement, while another one is a political statement. Which makes sense, given that religious affiliation is a protected group when it comes to employment, while political affiliation/speech typically isn't.
- akomtu 5y ago
  In other words, if you were a judge and we're presented with a range of offenders wearing tshirts with "two genders", "satan church", "flat earth" and "vaccine hoax" logos, you'd selectively label them as political, religious, unscientific and "dangerous disinformation" and issue sentences accordingly? If that's the case, this isn't different from how the inquisition operated long ago, except that they would praise the flat earth and two genders guys, and execute on the spot the satan worshipper. Freedom of speech is about protecting all viewpoints, including the ones you don't like and even the ones you deem offensive.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    > if you were a judge and we're presented with a range of offenders wearing tshirts with "two genders", "satan church", "flat earth" and "vaccine hoax" logos, you'd selectively label them as political, religious, unscientific and "dangerous disinformation" and issue sentences accordingly? No, I would label them all as "political" except the satan church one. Because the satan church tshirt you mentioned doesn't make any kind of a statement aside from signaling belonging to or support of a religious group. However, if the satan church tshirt made an additional statement (after "satan church") like "abortions should be legal", I would count it as a political statement as well. "Flat earth" is just as much of a political statement as "Spherical earth" is (science and validity aside). You can get fired for either without much legal repercussions for the employer. Whether you get fired or not for wearing that tshirt is fully up to how your boss feels about it. To put it simply, "protected class/speech" doesn't mean that you can wrap any statement inside of it and you are protected from getting fired. Especially if that statement you wrapped inside goes directly against another protected class (e.g., if you had a christian church tshirt that said "islam is a fake religion"), then I bet you are gonna get fired extremely fast, and saying "religion is a protected class" won't help you much there.

EGreg 5y ago

Basically, the difference is whether the US government can compel private organizations to give a platform to someone. The idea of "incorporating" the Bill of Rights against states and cities is a result of the Due Process clause of the 14th amendment. (For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the Heller decision would eventually result in US cities like NYC, SF and LA being unable to require gun licenses anymore, after someone sues them like in MacDonald vs Chicago). That said, Facebook and Twitter are not publicly owned, they are "private" corporations (which are publicly traded). The problem isn't their specific decisions, but that they are too big. The Sherman Antitrust act actually gave a lot of teeth to the idea that the public government can break up businesses if they abuse their monopoly power (and supported even by Republican presidents like Teddy Roosevelt). Ma Bell. Standard Oil. Etc. Today, people look at Facebook and Google as targets for breaking them up into competing companies or unbundling their departments from favoring one another. As a left-libertarian, I would instead like to subsidize open-source software to disrupt these Big Tech monopolies from the ground up. And it's a subtle point, but I would like for the State to simply pass laws explicitly declining to enforce property rights and other rights of entities that "control too much". Landlords who own too many houses, or banks that merge together into large conglomerates will be put on notice that the public system will not enforce their rights against members of the public, past a certain point. It doesn't serve society for private property to have no limits, similarly to how you can't scale up Roman era ships and still have them seaworthy. I recently gave an interview at Glasgow Caledonian University about the economics of free speech, where I go into detail about the problems and solutions in all the aspects around Capitalism and Free Speech, from money in politics, to deplatforming, to Big Tech filter bubbles, to clickbait news, to the Sinclair television chorus. It contains a lot of critiques of Capitalism and Competition as the basis for free speech. If anyone has about 30 minutes to listen through it, I would love your feedback: https://youtu.be/M8HbvC6vqIY https://youtu.be/M8HbvC6vqIY

pessimizer 5y ago

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech, and everything to do with workers' rights. You can't be fired for belonging to a protected class, but you can be fired for literally anything else - hence people are still rarely punished for firing members of a protected class. There was an upheld case a few years ago where a man fired one of his employees for being too sexy. Not acting too sexy, or dressing too sexy, but being too sexy. You can fire someone for wearing Adidas, or for breathing too loudly (unless it can be shown to be the effect of a disability.) The idea that we should have special rules for racists and sexists is an insult. It would be in effect creating a protected class for bigots, who could still be fired for wearing green on Thursday. The most absurd part of this is that the vast majority of the people decrying "cancel culture" are the most antagonistic to any normalization of worker's rights, or enforcement of minority protections. Apparently, the only real racism is when you call someone a racist.

axaxs 5y ago
Good points all around. Since work is so vital to our everyday survival, and as pointed out, often health insurance, it should be much harder or with much better reason to fire someone than what currently exists today(which, in most states is nothing). I by no means intended to advocate for chiseling out special protections for bigots or antagonists.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I'll admit to a little frustration with people who act like current law (usually the first amendment) protects people from "cancellation" by private actors. But I'm more open to arguments that we should create new employment law that makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people. I don't think this is a good idea, for the record, but it is a reasonable argument to make. Many other countries have much stronger worker protections, which work well for them. I don't personally think they would fit with all the other interlocking policies in the US, but it's definitely not a crazy thing to discuss. But it's also not the case that it's a first amendment issue.
  - ipaddr 5y ago

Balgair 5y ago

> The problem is, where does one draw the line? The article goes into one of the possible problems: cyberbullying. Especially with young women, cyberbullying is a bit of a problem. Though the people involved in this case are not involved with cyberbullying, it's not difficult to jump to that issue with the people involved. Though it depends on local laws, schools often have the mandate to stop bullying and other such behaviors. Courts have been mixed thus far on how cyberbullying is legalistically different than regular bullying and where the mandates/responsibilities (if they exist) start and end for the school administration, especially with mixed minor-adult populations. It is, admittedly, a very difficult line to draw. As the article states, SCOTUS rarely gets into school-student speech issues, so this decision is expected to set the stage for the next 25-50 years of US policy in the now digital era EDIT: It's not just young women, cyberbullying is more of an universal problem.

tomp 5y ago
If cyber-bullying is really that problematic, it should be a crime. Schools aren’t called to solve crime; they should defer to the police.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  I'm confused: you say only the police should do something about it, so do you mean that society shouldn't try to prevent bullying, or that the police should run the schools?
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    I assume they mean (and I agree) that society should try to prevent bullying (that is, criminal harrasment) by reporting it to the police, not by engaging in vigilante 'justice', which is what any school discipline for off campus activity (and really, cancel culture in general) amounts to. If you believe your vigilanteism is justified (because, and only because, the police won't or can't do their jobs) the onus is on you to clearly communicate that your actions are because the police won't or can't do their jobs, and to support that assertion with resonable evidence, in every single case.

hodgesrm 5y ago

> The way it sits today, the majority of people are afraid to speak their thoughts for fear of workplace retaliation. I hear this argument regularly. Can you cite evidence showing it's actually true?

vquantum 5y ago
Look at this mail from the Python Steering Council: https://marc.info/?l=python-dev&m=161652621725348&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=python-dev&m=161652621725348&w=2 Similar rants from last year have been deleted. Whenever someone posts the evidence you ask for, it is usually flagged instantly. Perhaps that is why evidence is rarely seen.
- netrus 5y ago
  Well yes, many people will want to say "fuck you" to their boss at some point in time, and will not do so for fear of retaliation. In the example you post, someone is ridiculing a group decision on a sensitive topic. Do you actually think that there should be no negative consequences to _ridiculing_ the decisions of your boss or coworkers? Being a dick has always been a way to lose your job, and I think that's okay.
axaxs 5y ago
https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-th... I've read this multiple times over the last couple years. Please don't accuse me of cherry picking, I don't know anything about Cato, I just googled it and it was the first link(well, via thehill).
- sellyme 5y ago
  Extremely off-topic, but that URL is a great example of why using headline/lede text in links is a bad idea. Really loses its punch when the '%' gets stripped.
- hodgesrm 5y ago