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When you attack an individual because of the place s/he chooses to work you take the "Let's all protest the activities of Big X" down to a personal level. I'd b
by mdip 13y ago
When you attack an individual because of the place s/he chooses to work you take the "Let's all protest the activities of Big X" down to a personal level. I'd be horrified if I woke up and found a large group of people protesting in front of my house because of who I work for. Reading this message, I instantly put myself in that employee's shoes and instantly became hostile toward the organization arranging this. I made a second near-instantaneous cognitive jump, and this is the most important part, to completely disregarding whatever legitimate (or otherwise) complaints this group had and to assume that I should give Google the benefit of the doubt. This may be just me, since I avoid politics at nearly all costs, but despite the fact that I'd probably agree with this particular groups gripes, I can't make my mind see them as anything other than a waste of perfectly good oxygen.
Did they change my political opinion? Probably not, but they were more likely to make me against their particular cause than for it by this action.
Can anyone see anything of value that they might have gained in the process? I'm finding it difficult to come up with anything...
- scarmig 13y agoQuestion: people will often protest at the houses of CEOs, who consider themselves just employees doing their jobs. E.g. after the Bhopal disaster, people protested at the home of the Union Carbide CEO as he was trying to evade responsibility and minimize payouts to the victims. Is this inappropriate? I agree with you that the protestors didn't gain anything from this particular protest and did harm to their cause, if anything.
- aaronem 13y agoIt's still inappropriate, but considerably less so, both because a C-level officer of such a large company is likely to have security arrangements of some sort, and because a C-level officer has at least some influence over the policies of the company in question -- the CEO, of course, most of all. That said, there is a qualitative difference between showing up at the guarded front gate of a CEO's mansion, and showing up on the ordinary front doorstep of a rank-and-file employee's two-story house. The former can at least be said to "go with the territory". The latter verges very closely on an imminent threat of bodily harm; the whole point of such action is to demonstrate to its victim that he and his family are not safe anywhere, not even in their home.
- pnathan 13y agoOfficers of the company by definition have a responsibility for the company and its activities. This is not true of non-officers as a general rule.