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Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their s
by bluescrn 3y ago
Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their speech/thoughts, many still defend that as 'perfectly reasonable consequences of unacceptable speech'
- space_fountain 3y agoI think regardless of what you think of policing speech generally it just is clearly worse when the entity controlling the police does it
- oooyay 3y agoEveryone across the spectrum does it. It's a way of reinforcing the power of a particular political camp. There's a way to fix that though, make it very difficult to fire people. Then companies will need to be incredibly clear about what conditions they're choosing to terminate under.
- gs17 3y ago>make every state a right to work state instead of at will In the US, "right-to-work state" likely refers to the opposite of what you mean. It's "right to not join a union and not pay dues".
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- oooyay 3y agoI changed the terminology as suggested and was immediately down voted to -4.
- mcguire 3y agoThe United Kingdom is not a state in the United States.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoI mean technically you're right. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each oversea territories of the United States instead of the UK itself being a state.
- comprev 3y agoThanks to Brexit it's also becoming less "United" /s
- Wildgoose 3y agoNo, that's thanks to unbalanced Devolution which grants Parliaments and self-government to everyone except the English who are still (over-)ruled by the Union Parliament in Westminster.
- psd1 3y agoNo, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked. The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union. But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it. Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house. Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.
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- gretch 3y agoThis is the government doing it, which is clearly wrong because they are supposed to be protecting your speech rights. If someone robs a corner gas station, you think “dang that’s a shame”. If the military robs a gas station, you think “umm wtf?”
- jlawson 3y agoNo, if someone robs me at a corner gas station, I think "my government should have done a better job protecting my rights". Having your human rights violated is not like stubbing your toe.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoThe problem is hypocrisy - UK government applied pressure to universities and other institutions to stop DE platforming, but itself bans industry experts from conferences when they disagree with government ministers.
- notahacker 3y agoYes, because obviously the only possible options are a state surveillance program to flag up any teaching assistants who criticise any aspect of government policy and teaching bureaucracy, or the sort of "free speech absolutism" that concludes that literally nothing a teacher could say could ever render them unsuitable for a teaching job. No middle ground is possible.
- robertlagrant 3y agoGood to get the sarcastic straw man out of the way, so we can get back to the actual conversation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- notahacker 3y agoThe "actual conversation" being one based entirely on the highlighted bad faith false equivalence between private citizens exercising their right to object to offensive and discriminatory behaviour and government resources being used to compile lists of people who has expressed doubts about its policy...
- partitioned 3y agoBut that activism is free speech itself always funny when the free speech absolutist gets mad when people use free speech to cancel someone
- hamhock666 3y agoYes it’s free speech, I think the issue here is that companies care what their employees say about politics outside of work, enough to fire them if they find out. Not really in the spirit of free speech.
- bluescrn 3y agoIt's not so much that the companies care about the individual 'wrongthinkers', they're worried about what the activists could do to the reputation of their company/brand. The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.
- robertlagrant 3y agoPeople conspiring to raise up hatred of an individual, and people of the same mind in HR departments green lighting the acquiesence to that hatred, is the problem. Someone shouting a swear word at me while killing me is unpleasant, but I'll allow it. It's the killing that's the problem.
- anigbrowl 3y agoThat kind of depends on the individual and what they're doing, no?
- robertlagrant 3y agoNot the individual, no. Only what they're doing.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoThese groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. It's not surveillance if it's public, it's sousveillance.
- lmm 3y ago> These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. In practice they can. The method they use isn't the force of law, but the result is the same.
- superb_dev 3y agoWhich telecom company specifically is releasing people's records?
- krisoft 3y ago> In practice they can. How would a group of private citizens get a copy of all communications of an other private citizen? Are there any documented cases of this ever happening?