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For all the value of political correctness in the workplace, someone just lost their job for their honest views, because some found them too ugly to bear. If yo

For all the value of political correctness in the workplace, someone just lost their job for their honest views, because some found them too ugly to bear. If you're still thirsty for more ugly truth, check out a Twitter search for @paxdickinson just now. Apparently to many, honesty is objectively worse than endless vengeful hate. I don't support anything this guy said, but clearly some of it was sarcasm, and as for the rest of it, differences of opinion are entropy, and every time we suppress them, the universe gets that little bit colder and humanity dies that little bit quicker.. There are no winners here. I find everything about this episode a disgrace on both sides.

rit 13y ago
He was in a position to hire people, and expressing views that clearly indicated bias towards certain protected classes. That alone would be cause for concern. I don't know that I"d advocate his firing, but I'd certainly question his authority to hire & fire staff based on the things he's said.
- hosay123 13y ago
  This generalizes further than just antifeminism. Christians and atheists are usually in positions to hire people. I guess we should just fire everybody who ever believed in anything, and then we'd have a perfect world, right?
  - untog 13y ago
    Where did you get the idea that "believing in anything" is the reason he got fired? It's quite simple (and already explained by rit). He posted numerous messages disparaging various groups - blacks, women, gays. He is responsible for hiring within the company. This places Business Insider in an utterly compromised position and in danger of lawsuits.
    - rit 13y ago
      Exactly. And it potentially opens up legal grounds, with evidence. Every member of the protected classes he has venomously disparaged, who applied for and didn't get a job (or was fired) to claim discrimination by him.
    - fedvasu 13y ago
      Yeah, But he is not announcing anything on behalf of BI right? There is an implicit disclaimer that all views are his not his employers (I am sure atleast he thinks that way). Yes BI is entitled to fire him as it portrays them in bad-light in public but that wouldn't attract lawsuits (may be american law is fucked-up). I don't know.
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Yeah, But he is not announcing anything on behalf of BI right So? Even aside from the PR (and potential advertising sales) aspects -- which are probably the main factor -- anything he says in public on behalf of himself is, even if not made on behalf of the company, evidence that can be used to establish his motive in any decision he makes on behalf of the company (e.g., hiring/firing) in the event of a lawsuit.
    - hosay123 13y ago
      Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion. Right now I'm looking at the Twitter search results and being reminded why I hate people in general. Should expressing this opinion get me fired? Should I be prohibited from occupying a position of hiring people because I am prejudiced to assume they are capable of what I'm seeing in those search results? Somehow it's not fair. A Christian or Atheist or (pre-1960s) homosexual sympathizer would present the same risks to a business as Dickinson did here. His views aren't considered progressive by any means, but 50 or 100 years ago neither would the views of an Atheist or a homosexual. I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer. And I can't find that line. I can't say, without making an absolute judgement using a perfect computer and a perfect observation of the global state of the universe, whether the sympathizer was correct at the time, or whether Dickinson is somehow wrong now. All I know is that nobody appears to have been harmed except Dickinson, and I won't be hearing his opinions any time soon, and that's a crying shame.
      - untog 13y ago
        I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer. Well, a homosexual sympathizer in a hiring position 60 years ago would have been more inclusive in their choices for candidate. A bigot in the 21st Century would be be more exclusive. He is not being suppressed for holding an opinion. He is perfectly entitled to hold that opinion. And Business Insider is perfectly entitled to fire him to avoid being associated with an opinion that does not match their company values.
        hosay123 13y ago
        That's only true if the sympathizer never heard a candidate say "I fucking hate gays". I'm not sure how I feel about your last paragraph yet.
      - theorique 13y ago
        Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion. He's not being suppressed (and now fired) for holding an opinion. He was fired for publicly expressing views that were incompatible with his job as CTO. He said in a public medium (Twitter), tagged with his professional title, that he believed superb female developers were as rare as unicorns. Any woman who had ever interviewed and been turned down for a dev position at Business Insider might have a legal case for unfair discrimination in hiring. The other stuff (racism, sexism, etc) is one thing, but the example I mentioned above exposed his company to legal liability. That's not a responsible thing for a person in a decision-making and hiring position to do.
  - bigonlogn 13y ago
    His views aren't the issue, his outspokenness is. How could a woman ever feel comfortable interviewing with this guy, let alone, working for him. What if said woman was a great fit for the company and had a lot to contribute? His ability to hire and fire effectively is compromised. Not because of his views, but because he couldn't keep his mouth shut about them. Sometimes knowing when to shut the hell up is a far greater asset than being outspoken and opinionated. Especially about things related to your job...
- jcromartie 13y ago
  I'm not sure I see that bias. Did he ever indicate that he thought certain people were unfit for a job because of their gender, religion, etc.?
  - Thrymr 13y ago
    He made this public comment on a BI job posting thread [1]: "@Liberal Insider: Haha, you'd feel pretty silly for writing that comment if you ever saw my twitter feed and read all the horrible things I say about Obama. :)" [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-mobile-apps-developer-2012-9?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1#comment-5065d81a69beddb35c000009 http://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-mobile-apps-developer-...
    - jcromartie 13y ago
      I don't get it. "Liberal Insider" said that you need to be a "bleeding heart liberal" who would support Barack Obama to work at BI. Pax refuted this referring to his history of statements against Obama. I doubt it very much that he was implying you needed to be liberal OR conservative to work at BI.
      - Thrymr 13y ago
        You can read it that way, sure. But why would anyone with hiring authority ever make a comment like that on a public forum about his own job posting?
  - theorique 13y ago
    This one specifically disparaged female devs: "Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn." https://twitter.com/paxdickinson/status/202095372355633152 https://twitter.com/paxdickinson/status/202095372355633152
minimaxir 13y ago
It's about representing the business, which he clearly did. Putting a "all opinions are my own" in the bio is not a get-out-of-jail free card.
darkarmani 13y ago
How are we suppressing his differences of opinion? Are you suggesting the BI isn't allowed to hire or fire whoever they want? >> In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though. You'd put this guy in charge of your business?
- defen 13y ago
  Some of his other tweets are really bad, but I think this one is a legitimately funny satire of Mel Gibson. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/mel-gibsons-new-racist-ra_n_632602.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/mel-gibsons-new-rac.... If The Onion had written it everyone would have had a good laugh and moved on.
  - rjknight 13y ago
    Good catch.
  - darkarmani 13y ago
    > If The Onion had written it everyone would have had a good laugh and moved on. That's a very good point: context matters. Being a C-level employee is very different than being a comedian (or telling jokes like that in sunday school).
DannoHung 13y ago
I hope you choke on a razor blade. That's my honest view. Oh, wait, that's an offensive and horrible thing to say. Maybe we need to be held accountable for our opinions. Now, I guess, the real question is whether my first statement is sarcasm or not.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Unless the parent is a sword swallower in the circus, your honest view will require no less than 2 Monty Python sketches to fulfill. so it is obviously sarcasm.
RockyMcNuts 13y ago
Somebody just lost the privilege of being senior management over acting like someone who can't lead by example and put his firm in a bad light. He didn't lose his job as night watchman. You want to be a leader, you have to act the way you expect people in your company to act. If you think this is just 'political correctness', you're wrong. It's about leadership and not having a company culture of being a bunch of a-holes.
- RockyMcNuts 13y ago
  I guess HN kills these discussions because they bring out the trolls and show YC in a pretty bad light.
fingerprinter 13y ago
I don't get this. He has a pretty, IMO, hateful view of the world. I don't care if he is honest if he is also a sociopath and a fucking asshole. Use this filter. If you were running a company and came across this type of personality, would you want them in your company? What if they were anti-gay? Anti-white? Anti-immigrant? And not just held those views but basically YELLED them in PUBLIC while using your company name? Yeah, common sense says you need to get rid of them. No, BI is better off without him. I would say the tech industry as an entity would be much better off the less of these people we have in it. It has nothing to do with honesty, but empathy, intelligence, and common sense.
- hosay123 13y ago
  Practically, these are great, fair, and true points, and I agree with them. Idealistically, another side of me fucking hates this. Nothing would ever change, and humanity would never progress if we withheld our differences of opinion. At what point does an opinion become too extreme to share?
  - blazingfrog2 13y ago
    He is absolutely free to share it. As he said in a previous rant, "this is a free country". However, it seems foolish of him to expect the entity he represents to continue employing him when his views go against that entity's interest (making money).
  - fingerprinter 13y ago
    When it is conflated with your work, or you education or anything that is not 100% you. And have absolutely no illusions. If you have a hateful opinion, fine. But if you are very vocal about it, even just between the walls of work, don't expect to not be disciplined for it. You are creating a hostile work environment and, well, I'm sorry, you can't expect to protected in that case. And, btw, this is not hard. Get a different twitter account if you want to spout your opinions. Make sure it has no connection to your work. I have three twitter accounts. One is "me", that I use for work stuffs. One is more for close friends and people I know in public. The last is my controversial one that I use.
newnewnew 13y ago
The politically correct and their defenders engage in Crocodile Humor, the laughter of the powerful at the powerless[1]. It is an ugly thing to behold. "Many UR readers have had the priceless educational privilege of growing up behind the Iron Curtain. These readers will identify Professor DeLong’s tone at once: it is the tone of the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil[2]. I will take the liberty of Anglicizing, and call it “crocodile humor.” Extremely educated readers may also be familiar with the Nazi variant, as found in Der Stürmer and the like. The material is different, of course, but the tone is unmistakable. We’ll hear a good deal more of it in the next four years. Crocodile humor is the laughter of the powerful at the powerless. It is not intended to be funny. It is intended to intimidate. Those who laugh, as many do, are those who love to submerge themselves in a mob, feel its strength as theirs, chant and shake their spears as one." [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/president-obama-with-little-perspective.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/preside... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil
- rollo_tommasi 13y ago
  It is beyond ludicrous to suggest that a C-suite executive at a media company is "the powerless".
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    Who can get who fired is a flawed measure of power, but a good first approximation. Which groups can say racist statements about which other groups and still keep their jobs? Also a good question for measuring relative power. We'll ask Anil Dash[1] If your HR department toes the official feminist line, feminism has power. If someone can get you fired for making a dongle joke to your friend, that is power. The myth that white males all hold positions of power is itself evidence of the power that cultural Marxists hold. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361167
- theorique 13y ago
  Mr Dickinson tweeted disparaging comments about female developers (while serving as CTO and thus being in a position to hire developers). He tweeted out sarcastic comments about the "Passion of the Christ" with a racial slur against blacks. Oh, and he did this from a twitter account with mini-bio that featured his position as CTO of Business Insider. I'm far from politically correct, but if I were CEO and this were my CTO, and I heard about this, he would have one and only one chance to make his account anonymous and disconnect it from my company and my brand. Personal views and "your own time" is one thing, but when you put your professional title (especially at CxO level) and your company name in your twitter bio, you're representing a brand whether or not you want to be. He wasn't fired because liberals engaged in Crocodile Humor. He was fired because he made an unprofessional social media decision and attracted a hurricane of shit from a broad swath of the internet that spilled over to the brand of his company.
rjknight 13y ago
I kinda want to agree - I tend to believe that a person's private beliefs and public behaviour can be separated, and that we're all capable of behaving properly when the situation demands it, leaving us free to think what we like on our own time. Two things complicate this: firstly, social networks are really making the idea of a 'private sphere' of beliefs that are separate from one's public role unsustainable. Secondly, CTO is a high-profile role, a representative of the company with responsibilities including dealing with technical partners and attracting new employees. This role is compromised by behaving in a way that is very likely to damage those relationships. Obviously, he's now going to be on the receiving end of abuse that's as bad or worse than anything he's ever said himself. In the interests of consistency, I obviously have to deplore this; two wrongs don't make a right. The sight of a bunch of righteously-enraged Twitter users piling on is not exactly edifying and won't do anything to persuade anyone that civil discourse is the way to a better future. A couple of years ago I thought we might be on the verge of a new era of permissiveness, in the sense that policing the subjectively offensive thoughts of others would be so obviously impossible that we'd have to accept the existence of offensive ideas and aim instead for the more achievable (and more liberal, to a given definition of 'liberal') goal of ensuring that people simply ensure that their public (in the sense of official or political) conduct is impartial irrespective of their private beliefs. Now, I'm not so sure. People seem to like being outraged by others, and seem to want to suppress views they dislike even if no identifiable harm has been caused (in fact, one can always claim some harm on the basis that someone's feelings were hurt). It now seems to be reasonable to argue in favour of, in effect, a campaign for the improvement of public morals, a notion that seemed remote only recently. That said, I also personally think that this guy sounds like an asshole, and I wouldn't have wanted him as my boss or my subordinate if he displayed any of the attitudes on show in his Twitter feed in the workplace. It's highly likely that he did so, and for all we know he could have been under existing disciplinary warnings or subject to internal complaints. It might be that what people say about him on Twitter has nothing to do with him being fired.
epistasis 13y ago
> someone just lost their job for their honest views, because some found them too ugly to bear. This is both true, and a very good thing. This guy had the title of CTO, and at that level one must be a leader in the views that they express. If one expresses views that are inconsistent with the values of the company, and you are supposed to be a leader, then your job is on the line. This is true of all sorts of views, not just social views, and the C level people need to be held accountable for the public face that they choose to put out there. And if this guy's views reduce their hiring pool by half because he's scaring away employees over trivial and bad reasons, he is actively harming the company and should be fired. Saying that a view is "honest" doesn't matter a damn, whether it's endorsing competitors products or being a misogynist. When you are an employee, you can't be actively damaging your company, and when you are in a leadership role, your words have much more power, and can both be far more helpful or hurtful to the company.

rit 13y ago

He was in a position to hire people, and expressing views that clearly indicated bias towards certain protected classes. That alone would be cause for concern. I don't know that I"d advocate his firing, but I'd certainly question his authority to hire & fire staff based on the things he's said.

hosay123 13y ago
This generalizes further than just antifeminism. Christians and atheists are usually in positions to hire people. I guess we should just fire everybody who ever believed in anything, and then we'd have a perfect world, right?
- untog 13y ago
  Where did you get the idea that "believing in anything" is the reason he got fired? It's quite simple (and already explained by rit). He posted numerous messages disparaging various groups - blacks, women, gays. He is responsible for hiring within the company. This places Business Insider in an utterly compromised position and in danger of lawsuits.
  - rit 13y ago
    Exactly. And it potentially opens up legal grounds, with evidence. Every member of the protected classes he has venomously disparaged, who applied for and didn't get a job (or was fired) to claim discrimination by him.
  - fedvasu 13y ago
    Yeah, But he is not announcing anything on behalf of BI right? There is an implicit disclaimer that all views are his not his employers (I am sure atleast he thinks that way). Yes BI is entitled to fire him as it portrays them in bad-light in public but that wouldn't attract lawsuits (may be american law is fucked-up). I don't know.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Yeah, But he is not announcing anything on behalf of BI right So? Even aside from the PR (and potential advertising sales) aspects -- which are probably the main factor -- anything he says in public on behalf of himself is, even if not made on behalf of the company, evidence that can be used to establish his motive in any decision he makes on behalf of the company (e.g., hiring/firing) in the event of a lawsuit.
  - hosay123 13y ago
    Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion. Right now I'm looking at the Twitter search results and being reminded why I hate people in general. Should expressing this opinion get me fired? Should I be prohibited from occupying a position of hiring people because I am prejudiced to assume they are capable of what I'm seeing in those search results? Somehow it's not fair. A Christian or Atheist or (pre-1960s) homosexual sympathizer would present the same risks to a business as Dickinson did here. His views aren't considered progressive by any means, but 50 or 100 years ago neither would the views of an Atheist or a homosexual. I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer. And I can't find that line. I can't say, without making an absolute judgement using a perfect computer and a perfect observation of the global state of the universe, whether the sympathizer was correct at the time, or whether Dickinson is somehow wrong now. All I know is that nobody appears to have been harmed except Dickinson, and I won't be hearing his opinions any time soon, and that's a crying shame.
    - untog 13y ago
      I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer. Well, a homosexual sympathizer in a hiring position 60 years ago would have been more inclusive in their choices for candidate. A bigot in the 21st Century would be be more exclusive. He is not being suppressed for holding an opinion. He is perfectly entitled to hold that opinion. And Business Insider is perfectly entitled to fire him to avoid being associated with an opinion that does not match their company values.
      - hosay123 13y ago
        That's only true if the sympathizer never heard a candidate say "I fucking hate gays". I'm not sure how I feel about your last paragraph yet.
    - theorique 13y ago
      Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion. He's not being suppressed (and now fired) for holding an opinion. He was fired for publicly expressing views that were incompatible with his job as CTO. He said in a public medium (Twitter), tagged with his professional title, that he believed superb female developers were as rare as unicorns. Any woman who had ever interviewed and been turned down for a dev position at Business Insider might have a legal case for unfair discrimination in hiring. The other stuff (racism, sexism, etc) is one thing, but the example I mentioned above exposed his company to legal liability. That's not a responsible thing for a person in a decision-making and hiring position to do.
- bigonlogn 13y ago
  His views aren't the issue, his outspokenness is. How could a woman ever feel comfortable interviewing with this guy, let alone, working for him. What if said woman was a great fit for the company and had a lot to contribute? His ability to hire and fire effectively is compromised. Not because of his views, but because he couldn't keep his mouth shut about them. Sometimes knowing when to shut the hell up is a far greater asset than being outspoken and opinionated. Especially about things related to your job...
jcromartie 13y ago
I'm not sure I see that bias. Did he ever indicate that he thought certain people were unfit for a job because of their gender, religion, etc.?
- Thrymr 13y ago
  He made this public comment on a BI job posting thread [1]: "@Liberal Insider: Haha, you'd feel pretty silly for writing that comment if you ever saw my twitter feed and read all the horrible things I say about Obama. :)" [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-mobile-apps-developer-2012-9?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1#comment-5065d81a69beddb35c000009 http://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-mobile-apps-developer-...
  - jcromartie 13y ago
    I don't get it. "Liberal Insider" said that you need to be a "bleeding heart liberal" who would support Barack Obama to work at BI. Pax refuted this referring to his history of statements against Obama. I doubt it very much that he was implying you needed to be liberal OR conservative to work at BI.
    - Thrymr 13y ago
      You can read it that way, sure. But why would anyone with hiring authority ever make a comment like that on a public forum about his own job posting?
- theorique 13y ago
  This one specifically disparaged female devs: "Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn." https://twitter.com/paxdickinson/status/202095372355633152 https://twitter.com/paxdickinson/status/202095372355633152

minimaxir 13y ago

It's about representing the business, which he clearly did. Putting a "all opinions are my own" in the bio is not a get-out-of-jail free card.

darkarmani 13y ago

How are we suppressing his differences of opinion? Are you suggesting the BI isn't allowed to hire or fire whoever they want? >> In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though. You'd put this guy in charge of your business?

defen 13y ago
Some of his other tweets are really bad, but I think this one is a legitimately funny satire of Mel Gibson. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/mel-gibsons-new-racist-ra_n_632602.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/mel-gibsons-new-rac.... If The Onion had written it everyone would have had a good laugh and moved on.
- rjknight 13y ago
  Good catch.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > If The Onion had written it everyone would have had a good laugh and moved on. That's a very good point: context matters. Being a C-level employee is very different than being a comedian (or telling jokes like that in sunday school).

DannoHung 13y ago

I hope you choke on a razor blade. That's my honest view. Oh, wait, that's an offensive and horrible thing to say. Maybe we need to be held accountable for our opinions. Now, I guess, the real question is whether my first statement is sarcasm or not.

venomsnake 13y ago
Unless the parent is a sword swallower in the circus, your honest view will require no less than 2 Monty Python sketches to fulfill. so it is obviously sarcasm.

RockyMcNuts 13y ago

Somebody just lost the privilege of being senior management over acting like someone who can't lead by example and put his firm in a bad light. He didn't lose his job as night watchman. You want to be a leader, you have to act the way you expect people in your company to act. If you think this is just 'political correctness', you're wrong. It's about leadership and not having a company culture of being a bunch of a-holes.

RockyMcNuts 13y ago
I guess HN kills these discussions because they bring out the trolls and show YC in a pretty bad light.

fingerprinter 13y ago

I don't get this. He has a pretty, IMO, hateful view of the world. I don't care if he is honest if he is also a sociopath and a fucking asshole. Use this filter. If you were running a company and came across this type of personality, would you want them in your company? What if they were anti-gay? Anti-white? Anti-immigrant? And not just held those views but basically YELLED them in PUBLIC while using your company name? Yeah, common sense says you need to get rid of them. No, BI is better off without him. I would say the tech industry as an entity would be much better off the less of these people we have in it. It has nothing to do with honesty, but empathy, intelligence, and common sense.

hosay123 13y ago
Practically, these are great, fair, and true points, and I agree with them. Idealistically, another side of me fucking hates this. Nothing would ever change, and humanity would never progress if we withheld our differences of opinion. At what point does an opinion become too extreme to share?
- blazingfrog2 13y ago
  He is absolutely free to share it. As he said in a previous rant, "this is a free country". However, it seems foolish of him to expect the entity he represents to continue employing him when his views go against that entity's interest (making money).
- fingerprinter 13y ago
  When it is conflated with your work, or you education or anything that is not 100% you. And have absolutely no illusions. If you have a hateful opinion, fine. But if you are very vocal about it, even just between the walls of work, don't expect to not be disciplined for it. You are creating a hostile work environment and, well, I'm sorry, you can't expect to protected in that case. And, btw, this is not hard. Get a different twitter account if you want to spout your opinions. Make sure it has no connection to your work. I have three twitter accounts. One is "me", that I use for work stuffs. One is more for close friends and people I know in public. The last is my controversial one that I use.

newnewnew 13y ago

The politically correct and their defenders engage in Crocodile Humor, the laughter of the powerful at the powerless[1]. It is an ugly thing to behold. "Many UR readers have had the priceless educational privilege of growing up behind the Iron Curtain. These readers will identify Professor DeLong’s tone at once: it is the tone of the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil[2]. I will take the liberty of Anglicizing, and call it “crocodile humor.” Extremely educated readers may also be familiar with the Nazi variant, as found in Der Stürmer and the like. The material is different, of course, but the tone is unmistakable. We’ll hear a good deal more of it in the next four years. Crocodile humor is the laughter of the powerful at the powerless. It is not intended to be funny. It is intended to intimidate. Those who laugh, as many do, are those who love to submerge themselves in a mob, feel its strength as theirs, chant and shake their spears as one." [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/president-obama-with-little-perspective.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/preside... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil

rollo_tommasi 13y ago
It is beyond ludicrous to suggest that a C-suite executive at a media company is "the powerless".
- newnewnew 13y ago
  Who can get who fired is a flawed measure of power, but a good first approximation. Which groups can say racist statements about which other groups and still keep their jobs? Also a good question for measuring relative power. We'll ask Anil Dash[1] If your HR department toes the official feminist line, feminism has power. If someone can get you fired for making a dongle joke to your friend, that is power. The myth that white males all hold positions of power is itself evidence of the power that cultural Marxists hold. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361167
theorique 13y ago
Mr Dickinson tweeted disparaging comments about female developers (while serving as CTO and thus being in a position to hire developers). He tweeted out sarcastic comments about the "Passion of the Christ" with a racial slur against blacks. Oh, and he did this from a twitter account with mini-bio that featured his position as CTO of Business Insider. I'm far from politically correct, but if I were CEO and this were my CTO, and I heard about this, he would have one and only one chance to make his account anonymous and disconnect it from my company and my brand. Personal views and "your own time" is one thing, but when you put your professional title (especially at CxO level) and your company name in your twitter bio, you're representing a brand whether or not you want to be. He wasn't fired because liberals engaged in Crocodile Humor. He was fired because he made an unprofessional social media decision and attracted a hurricane of shit from a broad swath of the internet that spilled over to the brand of his company.

rjknight 13y ago

I kinda want to agree - I tend to believe that a person's private beliefs and public behaviour can be separated, and that we're all capable of behaving properly when the situation demands it, leaving us free to think what we like on our own time. Two things complicate this: firstly, social networks are really making the idea of a 'private sphere' of beliefs that are separate from one's public role unsustainable. Secondly, CTO is a high-profile role, a representative of the company with responsibilities including dealing with technical partners and attracting new employees. This role is compromised by behaving in a way that is very likely to damage those relationships. Obviously, he's now going to be on the receiving end of abuse that's as bad or worse than anything he's ever said himself. In the interests of consistency, I obviously have to deplore this; two wrongs don't make a right. The sight of a bunch of righteously-enraged Twitter users piling on is not exactly edifying and won't do anything to persuade anyone that civil discourse is the way to a better future. A couple of years ago I thought we might be on the verge of a new era of permissiveness, in the sense that policing the subjectively offensive thoughts of others would be so obviously impossible that we'd have to accept the existence of offensive ideas and aim instead for the more achievable (and more liberal, to a given definition of 'liberal') goal of ensuring that people simply ensure that their public (in the sense of official or political) conduct is impartial irrespective of their private beliefs. Now, I'm not so sure. People seem to like being outraged by others, and seem to want to suppress views they dislike even if no identifiable harm has been caused (in fact, one can always claim some harm on the basis that someone's feelings were hurt). It now seems to be reasonable to argue in favour of, in effect, a campaign for the improvement of public morals, a notion that seemed remote only recently. That said, I also personally think that this guy sounds like an asshole, and I wouldn't have wanted him as my boss or my subordinate if he displayed any of the attitudes on show in his Twitter feed in the workplace. It's highly likely that he did so, and for all we know he could have been under existing disciplinary warnings or subject to internal complaints. It might be that what people say about him on Twitter has nothing to do with him being fired.

epistasis 13y ago

> someone just lost their job for their honest views, because some found them too ugly to bear. This is both true, and a very good thing. This guy had the title of CTO, and at that level one must be a leader in the views that they express. If one expresses views that are inconsistent with the values of the company, and you are supposed to be a leader, then your job is on the line. This is true of all sorts of views, not just social views, and the C level people need to be held accountable for the public face that they choose to put out there. And if this guy's views reduce their hiring pool by half because he's scaring away employees over trivial and bad reasons, he is actively harming the company and should be fired. Saying that a view is "honest" doesn't matter a damn, whether it's endorsing competitors products or being a misogynist. When you are an employee, you can't be actively damaging your company, and when you are in a leadership role, your words have much more power, and can both be far more helpful or hurtful to the company.