The fact that other people are free to speak against you does not mean that you can't speak freely.
Free speech does not mean freedom from having your speech acts criticized (quite the opposite; it includes freedom of others to criticize your speech acts.) And, yes, it means that your speech acts may affect your ability to hold a job where you are one of the major public faces of an organization (such as its CEO) and are not capable of dealing with the PR resulting from the association of those speech acts with a public face of the corporation (the same as it would if you couldn't deal with any other PR issue affecting the corporation, even if it wasn't resulting from your speech acts.)
While their behavior was entirely legal and protected by the First Amendment, the problem lies elsewhere. It's in the utter lack of tolerance to the views not conforming to the group's, not unlike the reaction religious extremists would display.
Can't help but quote:
--
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Tolerance Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why not.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
Why is it necessary to "come down hard" on people who express morally wreak (or even stupid) viewpoints?
Surely, putting forth a better argument or, at least, ignoring them is a far more morally superior response than suppressing their speech?
I've recently read about Bobby Sands (who was a IRA member who starved himself to death) and am reminded of that monk who lit themself on fire in protest.
I think an interesting question about these two people is why did their action have any impact? The authorities were against them and killing themselves doesn't "oppress" those authorities.
I think the opening paragraph of this book http://www.jstor.org/stable/3750951 is an interesting angle: martyrs against a cause illegitimize a cause.
If that is true, as I think it is, then it is crucially important to not victimize people no matter how wrong they may be. I think that the way to do that is, as I said above, to tolerate wrong viewpoints but respond to them or ignore them.
You think it's OK for a majority to say that racial Jews should not have property rights and then make it so? Eich achieved hos goal of writing oppression into the state constitution. Ignoring or tolerating promotion of oppression doesn't make it go away. (That's exactly the fair and balanced horseshit I was talking about.) Tolerating morally neutral actions is entirely different from tolerating morally bad actions.
Pretending that Eich's treatment for promoting oppression (or even the downvotes I've received for stating my views or you may have received for stating yours -- I've seen a lot of handwringing in this thread about maintaining multiple HN accounts and self-censoring themselves on HN as if that was some great horror) are in any way equivalent to actually taking away rights is another form of fair and balanced horseshit.
Suppose that everyone in the world (except Jews perhaps) believed that it WERE OK for them not to have property rights, then what would protect their property rights?
The truth is that what is right is decided by how well the arguments for it can convince people.
If you look back far enough, the arguments were: my army is stronger than you. As you get closer to the present, we tend to like using better arguments (the veil of ignorance for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance).
It's based on notions like the veil of ignorance that we can say maybe every human should have property rights lest the group we're part of today lose it when the balance of power shifts.
That's why I believe that jews should have property rights, but don't believe that advocating against what I believe should be stifled. I am confident enough that my argument is better than theirs to not need to prevent their speech if you prefer. I also don't believe that we should stifle: climate change denial, flat earthers, religious people, pro-life people and a host of other people that I believe are wrong.
You make a nonsense point (nobody is arguing for morality by majority rule) then refute it by pointing out that you have good arguments for advocating a certain morality. Then you make a straw man (nobody is arguing for stifling anybody).
At the core, you seem to agree with me that there are certain actions that we should be intolerant of. Things like murder we should not tolerate forcefully, and things like oppression, we should argue against strongly until they go into effect, in which case, other action is sometimes better.
Hmm, I thought thinking about my initial question would be enough to see my point from your perspective. Maybe it is.
You were, in your now flagged comment, arguing for stifling (or censoring if you prefer) people who, you believe, hold that kind of opinion.
The point I am making is that morality is only part of it. In practice, it doesn't matter that you're right if you're dead. You say that
> tolerating promotion of oppression doesn't make it go away
I'll answer that arguing with words without understanding the process that allows for people to agree to "fight" with words rather than weapons is even less likely to make bad ideas go away.
This won't convince you, I know, the tone of your replies shows an adversarial reading of my comments. But maybe one day you'll have a more skeptical approach to your own beliefs.
My now-flagged comment said absolutely nothing about censorship or stifling. It said bad actions shouldn't be tolerated. Again, what is bad isn't up for vote. It can be deduced logically -- see my other posts. Otherwise, why do people not follow the "extremes" in their religious texts?
You seem to hold a revisionist historical view that the civil rights movement was entirely unproductive, even though it was unpopular at the start (again, morality doesn't depend on the majority). Loudly pointing out bad actions works.
The funny thing about that now-flagged comment is that it was up to +5 points before it dropped fast. There must be an unwritten rule against calling out superstitions.
What do you mean by not tolerating if not stifling? If you look at the Mizzou and Yale things, stifling is exactly the right word: "we're just walking forward", "we can't hear you" and others.
> You seem to hold a revisionist historical view that the civil rights movement was entirely unproductive, even though it was unpopular at the start (again, morality doesn't depend on the majority).
My argument isn't that it didn't work, but that you fail to understand why it worked.
It worked because the arguments were convincing, not inherently because people pointed to something and said "this is stupid".
It has nothing to do with being loud (in the literal sense that I understand you to mean it).
Perhaps a better way to say what I'm trying to is: I think that the reason you arrive at the "right" conclusion is coincidental. The approach is flawed and it does and will lead to nonsense sometimes.
Another way to show what I mean is by counter-example: if someone advocated for, say, racial tolerance because they argued that we can't know who's a Christian based on race, I don't care if we agree on the conclusion, the process is a big problem.
Once again, you're pretending I said things that I didn't actually say. I said that certain bad actions should not be tolerated. Where you get stifling from this, I don't know. In particular, your first post claimed that we shouldn't be intolerant of people implementing (not merely talking about) Biblical punishments on gays, which is what I claimed that our society rightfully would very harshly not tolerate, just as our society wouldn't tolerate government-sanctioned mass lynchings of blacks
Yes you did say actions in that last post. I'm fairly certain your flagged post argued for "coming down hard" on people advocating for certain things rather than doing things. I'm fairly sure, given the tone, that I would still disagree with whatever you mean by "coming down hard"/"not tolerating", but this is getting speculative so I think this is a moot point.
> Biblical punishments on gays
Where does that come from? Was that what Eich wanted?
As far as I know, there was no advocacy for violence (something we do punish but in a due process, legal manner).
Are you arguing that you see no difference between 'death to the sinners' and whatever notion of 'sanctity of marriage' Eich might have espoused?
> just as there are certain hamburgers that are better than others
There's nothing that objectively makes a hamburger better than another. It's all subjective, just as views are subjective. Some people like bread a lot, so they may want a really thick bun which could be overpowering to another person. Some people are vegetarian, while others cringe in disgust at a black bean burger. It doesn't make those hamburgers any better or worse than others, though.
This is very true. I knew a guy who only ate fast food, and he could not (or would not) eat at better restaurants. He simply did not like anything but the fast food hamburgers.
It's exactly like hamburgers. At the top, there are actions that are hard to distinguish morally, just as there are hamburgers that are hard to distinguish quality-wise.
But we can all agree that a hamburger with actual shit in it is worse than a hamburger from Smashburger, just as there are certain actions that are clearly morally wrong and don't need to be evaluated with some false fairness.
> But we can all agree that a hamburger with actual shit in it is worse than a hamburger from Smashburger
I'm sure that out of the 7 billion people living on our planet, at least one person genuinely likes the taste of shit. To them, this wouldn't necessarily be true (I've never had a Smashburger and I don't like the taste of shit, so I couldn't possibly make this comparison myself). Which is why it's not objectively worse. It's all based on the person eating the burger, because everyone has different likes and tastes. That's why there's never one burger option; everyone shockingly doesn't like the same things.
Eating a burger with shit in it will likely kill you. Should I have said cyanide instead to get the point across? The point is that there are some burgers that are clearly worse than others (use your own imagination if cyanide doesn't work for you), just as there are certain actions that are clearly morally worse than others.
I can't help it of you don't understand the concept of an analogy. The form of this one is good X:bad X::good Y:bad Y. We're not dealing with GRE-level stuff here.
> Eating a burger with shit in it will likely kill you.
Preferences for death or risk of death are not exactly unknown, so, while that may be true, it isn't sufficient to establish the universal preference you've offered it to support.
> Should I have said cyanide instead to get the point across?
No, for the same reason. The problem isn't the example, the problem is that the point is wrong; whether or not one believes that an absolute morality exists (in whatever sense of "exists" makes sense for morality), you aren't going to any of its contents through universally-extent preferences, just as you won't for food, because preferences aren't universals.
Under the framework of cold rational logic. In what ways could Eich's actions be construed as morally positive without resorting to superstitions and other faulty logic?
You're absolutely right that my ideas are self-serving though. I am neither gay, nor black, nor a descendant of Abraham, but I am a human living in society. As such, I want to live as long as possible, and oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide is not going to help grow a scientific community large enough to keep me alive as long as I would like.
> Under the framework of cold rational logic. In what ways could Eich's actions be construed as morally positive without resorting to superstitions and other faulty logic?
Yeah that isn't an ethical framework. You were judging his actions under the framework of moral utilitarianism. The flaws with this can be found in a google search.
His actions could be construed as moral under a rule-utilitarian moral framework and a kantian virtue ethic framework. (The virtues being participating in politics and standing up for what you believe.)
> and oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide is not going to help grow a scientific community large enough to keep me alive as long as I would like
This is a straw man. Oppression of gays in the US amounted to not giving them the right to marriage and not having them be protected in the work place for their sexuality. Neither of which amount to "oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide".
Hilariously, the two justifications for Eich as you've presented them would paint Hitler as moral. As Feynman was fond of reiterating, there is a vast difference between naming something and understanding something, and you've illustrated his point perfectly.
As you're no doubt well aware, marriage rights encompass many other legal rights, and denying those rights is granting gays a form of second-class citizenship. This official form of discrimination combined with the private sector hate they receive for not being in a protected class causes gays ti have a higher rate of suicide than the rest of the population, continuing Turing's tradition.
>Hilariously, the two justifications for Eich as you've presented them would paint Hitler as moral.
First of all, neither are justifications. It was simply analyzing Eich's actions under a different moral framework as yours.
Second of all, yes, you could argue (this is the key word) Hitler's actions as moral (even though everyone would almost
Hilariously (not really actually) using your reasoning and your ethical framework you could also argue that paedophiles should not be discriminated against and that they deserve the right to sleep with and marry minors.
As society we don't want this so we choose to discriminate against child predators. Discrimination in this case is a pretty good thing.(I don't actually believe child predators should have this "right")
>As you're no doubt well aware, marriage rights encompass many other legal rights, and denying those rights is granting gays a form of second-class citizenship. This official form of discrimination combined with the private sector hate they receive for not being in a protected class causes gays ti have a higher rate of suicide than the rest of the population, continuing Turing's tradition.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. Yes, I'm aware of these things. They don't matter in the scope of this argument. You say that reason and logic drive your believes about what is moral but this entire section of the post I quoted is just an appeal to emotion.
Also don't you find it ironic that you can justify discriminating against someone because of their beliefs but you can't justify discriminating against someone because of their sexual identity?
And before you respond with an argument telling me you can choose what you believe. Can you really?
I think you're missing the point of the story. The point is, that unless you're tolerating something that you consider morally wrong or unethical, you can't really claim you're tolerant.
You're missing the point of my reply. Tolerance isn't good for tolerance's sake, and claiming that tolerating something that actively harms people is the same as tolerating something that is morally neutral is just fair and balanced horseshit that leads to Jews losing property rights and Gays losing rights in the state constitution.
Secular morals. Owning slaves obviously doesn't pass the test.
As a secular person, your main purpose is to live a long healthy life because that's all there is -- secular people don't get brownie points in the afterlife for the bodycount of heathens they've racked up. You will live a longer life if you live in a society of educated people who can do the science to keep you healthy and don't want to kill you (because you've oppressed them in slavery, because they have no money, or because they're brain-damaged from lead poisoning).
You're at best begging the question here. In the South there were (horribly wrong) people who honestly and truly believed (incorrectly) that not only was it morally permissible to own slaves, but that it was morally necessary. They (wrongly, racistly) believed that the only way the "African race" could be saved from "savagery" was to be in captivity.
This argument is clearly stupid and wrong from a 21st century perspective. But it was honestly believed. Under your framework, a slave owner in 1800 would be correct to "come down hard" on an abolitionist. After all, the abolitionist would be promoting "clearly wrong" morals.
The idea that a majority should "come down hard" on dissenting ideas is inherently a conservative (if not reactionary) move. In the 1950s, a vast majority of the country (wrongly) thought that homosexuality was a toxic sin that could (stupidly) infect children who were exposed to it. If you gave that majority the power to "come down hard" on dissenting views, the gay rights movement would never have happened. (Yes, I'm aware that lots of people in the gay rights movement were punished by the majority -- that was bad and we shouldn't encourage it).
So long as you get to decide what's right and wrong it's easy. But imagine George Bush got to decide. Or ISIS. Or some other group you don't like.
Well said. Crude majoritarian morality has hole after hole that even its most thoughtful adherents can do nothing to defend. Why people continue to invoke it is beyond me.
Revisionism with some sloppy relativism mixed in. For you to believe your argument, you must honestly believe that at some point in the future, it will be secularly moral to remove rights for gays, remove property rights from racial Jews, enslave blacks, and conquer, kill, and rape.
The truth is that nobody believed it was morally right to keep slaves who wasn't benefiting from it and using your type of relativism to sloppily justify it to themselves.
Ah, so killing isn't bad? You can call it morality or whatever other name you have for it, but there are actions that society shouldn't tolerate for entirely secular reasons.
But, IMHO, the threshold for taking arguments outside the political arena and into the realm of boycotts and demands for resignations should be a lot higher than it seems to be today. Otherwise vibrant, productive arguments don't happen, since everyone's concentrating on bankrupting the other side of money, "platforms", or legitimacy.
This is the reason I keep two HN accounts - I fear that any political comments I make here could jeopardize my professional life (about which I contribute fairly often).
Online, that's a fairly easy thing to manage. In real life, it means I really have to walk on eggshells a lot, and I seldom participate in voicing my opinions (or supporting certain causes) in which I'd otherwise participate, solely out of fear. In many cases, you can keep your personal views and professional life isolated, but not always. Maybe it's an irrational fear, but then again, in today's political climate it seems foolish not to worry about that.
And if that need to self-censor isn't cause for concern, I don't know what is.
I do this too. I found it almost impossible to post on my account under my own name, on any topic about psychology, politics, economics, or diversity because I am too afraid of what I've said being taken out of context later, or used against me in ways I can't anticipate now. I found myself frequently writing a post, only to delete it shortly afterward, worrying that it was somehow too risky.
In today's climate, you can't really even propose a thought experiment or discuss a hypothetical without being accused of holding that position yourself, and criticized as such. I don't even really have strong convictions about most of the things I discuss, except the desire to analyze them rationally and objectively, and the willingness to challenge both conventional wisdom and new radical positions.
Even while posting under an anonymous username, I still find myself self-censoring because of the risk that my identity could someday be connected. HN administrators can certainly trivially connect me, since they see the origin of my traffic for my two accounts, and I have not taken pains to anonymity the traffic for this one. However, HN admins themselves like pg have been posting under alts (and probably still do, for the same reasons), and seem to support this.
I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out. I think this would be better than having people feel like they can't post at all, or that they need alts to post. Having an alt is kind of like Anonymous Coward, except that you can't claim credit for just a single post that you turn out to feel OK about later.
The thing is, I think, that humans "try on" ideas like they try on clothes. We don't necessarily mean everything we say all the time (unless we take great pains to ensure it). The public discourse seems to expect that people have their minds firmly made up about everything, and a completely firm viewpoint that can be understood and criticized, but the reality is much more fluid. Or to put it differently: writing something that you can firmly stand behind requires a lot of time and energy, and a bar of quality and thoughtfulness and judgment that can rarely be met for Internet forum comments. Sometimes I'd just like to have a conversation, without fearing that something I say can be taken out of context and used against me years later when random-topic-of-the-day becomes a hot-button issue.
"I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out."
1. I've thought about this too.
2. I don't think it's possible because Google indexes these comments at lightning speed.
3. I used to wonder why HN only allows a user to delete for a specified period of time(a few minutes?). I think it's because of Google?
4. I have never used my real name on the Internet. Wait, I did have a Facebook account, but changed my real name years ago. I would like to use my real name, but just don't want to be taken out of context. Or, never forgiven fir having a bad day.
5. I would like to see the day where the IP owner can delete anything indexed by Google, or any database, but that will probably never happen.
6. People on here know the risks of posting under your real name, but the average person doesn't have a clue. They post away with a false sense of impunity.
7. What scares me most about the Internet never forgetting is what if a website decided to post your IP to your house number?
8. Then again 99.99 percent of the stuff I say, I believe strongly. It's just we need to play the phoney game in real life.
I view HN as a forum for professionals so I don't make comments that could negatively impact my professional life here. In that way I think self censure is fine. If you don't agree with my assessment thats fine as well of course.
Of course most of the sparse comments I make here are dumb jokes...
The point is, thanks to Social Justice Warriors, you never know what comment could affect your career. Expressing opinion about merits of Angular.js is probably safe. But anything that involves gender - a study, or a remark about distribution of men and women in tech industry - is not to be touched with a ten foot pole if you value your employability. It takes very little to become a victim of a Twitter outrage.
Bingo. Let's say that I wanted to argue that -- just for the sake of argument, not necessarily as a true belief -- that discrimination is not a significant problem in tech hiring with respect to diversity, and that the key problem is that there aren't qualified candidates from special-interest-group-in-question applying in the first place, and so the majority of the problem is upstream when you consider tech companies.
Is that something I'm allowed to say, even as a hypothetical? It seems like anyone saying that could be viciously attacked. Yet if we want to reason about the world objectively we need to consider all shades of truth and possibility, not blindly latch on to one particular idea and walk on eggshells while talking about it. The victimhood culture is completely stifling to any kind of discussion about such things.
Now, maybe we shouldn't have discussion about that on HN. I don't know. A lot of them have sure been interesting though. For example, I've found contributions by yummyfajitas particularly thought-provoking to read. He frequently challenges the "popular wisdom" and gets downvoted for it despite making what seem to me like reasonable, fair, respectful arguments that go against the popular activist narrative and victimhood culture. I don't know where I really land on these issues, but I've not been satisfied that there is adequate thoughtful analysis of them in mainstream culture (even arguably on HN).
I am hoping that this victimhood thing, and that attempts at social justice by creating privileges for special interest groups, are phenomena that are ultimately temporary as our society evolves to a greater level of egalitarianism and liberty. That is, I hope that what we're seeing now are the growing pains as old prejudice is put down, as we as society we eventually move past this (in whatever subdivision you care to name). We've seen huge strides for equality in recent years such as with recent US Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. But it feels like for every two positive strides, we take a step back with victimhood culture or by fighting injustice with more injustice (e.g., changes to Mormon Church doctrine on gays, to pick a totally random example).
The problem with starting these hypothetical-filled discussions is that they're not helpful. People can and have been positing many hypotheses about the pipeline issue in tech (and of course many other issues) and the discussions have been mostly heat and very little light.
What would be helpful, is if you would post actual objective findings--studies, analyses, etc. Cold hard facts. Otherwise you're just adding to the heat. Even my reply is not adding much right now, being primarily opinion.
It's hard to post actual objective findings, beacuse scientists themselves are seriously affected by the culture around those issues. Just like people are afraid of saying something contrary to the mainstream narrative, scientists are afraid to publish it too. On the other hand, a lot of studies - even completely unrelated to the issue - are having their conclusions purposefully and forcefully fitted to match the narrative, to score cheap popularity points. The topic is so politicized, that you can't rely even on studies to tell you anything at the moment.
I'm willing to admit that all I think about various minorities is completely wrong. I'll be happy to, when presented with evidence (and I've been adjusting my views every time I stumbled upon something that looked even little like legit research). Personally, I'm not arguing for any side of the issue. I'm arguing against using bad methodology, bad science, logical fallacies, lies and propaganda. I'm arguing for civility and detached behaviour in discussion. Only when people calm the fuck down we'll be able to figure out where the truth lies and how much we have to adjust at personal and societal level.
Still, people are not that insane yet to make expressing opinions about frameworks a danger to your employability. I've frequently been a part of flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivilized discussions about obvious superiority of Emacs over IDEs, or Lisp over everything, and never for a second felt I'll get fired for it, or that I'll lose my career, my home, or that I'll get into national news over it.
This is a frequently repeated argument and I find it less and less convincing. It is true that America's constitution only guarantees the congress will not abridge the freedom of speech. However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice; a right that is not codified by the constitution because it's simply irrelevant to a constitution. It seems to me that it's up to all of us to tolerate non-extreme dissenting voices, even if we disagree with them.
> However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice
Of course, there is a fundamental right to have (and express) a dissenting opinion or voice.
There is also a fundamental right to have (and express) displeasure with an opinion or voice, whether dissenting or not.
And there is no fundamental entitlement to a job whose responsibilities include managing the public image of a corporation, and if you are unable to do that in the real circumstances and public image problems the corporation faces, whether or not your own speech acts are the source of that PR problem, you shouldn't expect to continue to have that job.
I mean, yes, you're right, but surely, if voicing a dissenting opinion will damage or outright destroy your career, then unless you're extremely privileged and can afford to take the hit, you can't really do it, even if technically you have the right, can you?
Technological advances such as social media make vilifying dissenting views (and the people who express them) cheaper and more effective than ever before. There must be some kind of a balance between the right to dissent and the right to "have a displeasure with an opinion" as you said, and I feel like the way things are going now, it doesn't look like we have found that balance. Ultimately a healthy society will need both.
The problem is that the current system in practice legally protects certain opinions. E.g. If Eich was pro gay marriage and vocally so, firing him on that basis would have been very risky legally. Especially if he was gay, it would probably be impossible to fire him without losing an expensive lawsuit afterwards.
I don't think legally but more politically and PR wise. There a difference between firing someone for making donations to pro-X groups and firing someone for being X. In this hypothetical scenario, Eich would have to prove he was fired for being gay instead of for making a public donation that support a group and leads to potential blowback against the company. It's bad either way. Mozilla had a no win situation here. They got bad PR from both sides.
Forget about whether it has blowback against the company- It's totally legal AFAIK to fire someone for their "off the clock" speech for any or no reason at all.
In reality, though, I think a jury would be very skeptical of a company's claims that someone was fired for promoting the gay agenda (which would be legal) and not for being a gay person.
> However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice
Since we're not talking about the constitution, which strictly relates to government and public property, then we're talking about private entities and private property.
You do not have the right to speak on my property. Forcing that is in direct contradiction to a free society that has a concept of private property.
I am all for fostering tolerance to offensive speech, but not at the expensive of destroying the concept of private ownership. It is absolutely not a fundamental right. It should be a social norm, but that's all it should be.
> It seems to me that it's up to all of us to tolerate non-extreme dissenting voices
Who gets to define what is and is not extreme?
Freedom of expression means tolerating something offensive by definition. If it's not offensive, it doesn't need to be tolerated.
>Since we're not talking about the constitution, which strictly relates to government and public property, then we're talking about private entities and private property.
Except a lot of private entities receive a lot of money from the federal government - either as subsidies, tax breaks or programs. So they should abide by the rules of the government too. Giving public money to entities that not view the first amendment as obligatory for them - that is wrong for me.
A way to address this might be to add "political opinions" to the list of protected classes. It is undeniably bad for a democracy (I know I know, we aren't technically a democracy) where people aren't free in practice to discuss contentious issues.
As currently stands, you can stand in the town square and promote affirmative action it would be very risky legally to fire you. But if you get up and argue for the repeal of some affirmative action legislation you can be safely fired with no objection from legal.
> As currently stands, you can stand in the town square and promote affirmative action it would be very risky legally to fire you. But if you get up and argue for the repeal of some affirmative action legislation you can be safely fired with no objection from legal.
Legally, promoting either of those opinions is subject to exactly the same degree of protection. The willingness of a particular employer to accept the legal risk maybe different between them, but that's a different issue than the law itself.
That in practice it does not work as intended means it is bad law and needs tweaked. One way would be to say that all behavior "off the clock" and all attributes of a person not related to the job are protected. Another way would be to say nothing is protected. Right now we have a middle ground that plays favorites.
> That in practice it does not work as intended means it is bad law and needs tweaked.
In what specific, concrete ways does it not work out the way you think it is intended?
> One way would be to say that all behavior "off the clock" and all attributes of a person not related to the job are protected. Another way would be to say nothing is protected.
Those are obviously potential rules, but I don't see that either of them is closer to any reasonable interpretation of the intended result that antidiscrimination laws are intended to serve.
In what specific, concrete ways does it not work out the way you think it is intended?
I think we are starting to go in circles, but: It has the effect of cancelling out free discourse which is important to a functioning "democracy". A trivial example is that a business owner cannot be vocally anti-same sex marriage, because if she is, and a gay employee is fired for a "legitimate" reason, her behavior will go a long way towards convincing a jury.
Where this is going is why we are expanding the number of protected classes over time is that the real "intended result" is that you should not suffer at work for attributes that have nothing specifically to do with the job you are hired for.
The point is that calling for his resignation was grossly disproportionate.
Depends where you draw the line. Many people feel that when Eich chose to support groups that were running bigoted TV ads (beyond simply expressing an opinion as to a ballot issue) he effectively crossed that line.
...I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words
alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support
to have the time to "show, not tell"; and in the meantime
express my sorrow at having caused pain. ...
and who has never even been accused of discrimination, harassment, or abuse of any kind in his professional capacity (or otherwise AFAIK) should be given the chance to prove himself.
I'm pretty sure they didn't send the ads out for the approval of every campaign contributor before they aired them.
Eich's statement in that posting is indeed a valid, mitigating factor in his favor.
He could have done more, by addressing the issue of the TV ads directly. By not doing so, people had reason to believe he was sidestepping that key issue (and that he may not really understand why people were offended by those ads).
What can I say, that is just not the world I want to live in. A world in which your defeated [1] political opponents must repent, wear sackcloth, and cast ashes in their hair or else be professionally destroyed.
[1] Proposition 8 had been struck down by the time of Eich's appointment to CEO
It's now about repenting and wearing sackcloth. And it isn't even about Eich.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't want to feel that they were lending credibility to it, by having him at the head of an organization they were a part of. The message they were trying to send was simply, "we're really tired of this shit, and we want it to stop."
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin". Those aren't his words, but that's the gist of the religious-based opposition to gay marriage. You have to understand that at some point, people just get sick of hearing it -- or being a party to it.
It was the activists who dragged Eich's donation from years ago into the spotlight, made it an issue, and demanded that he apologize. The "pseudo-tolerant stance" people are/were "sick of hearing" or "being a party to" would never have seen the light of day if the activists just left Eich's personal political beliefs alone. This is precisely a demand for repentance.
Eich's stance was "pseudo-tolerant" because the activists were demanding that he renounce his religious beliefs. At least he had the stones not to say something he didn't believe just to keep his job. So instead he was cast out. Should a Catholic CEO be subjected to the same treatment if they personally oppose abortion? A Republican one for opposing Affirmative Action?
It's right there in your comment. You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
But even removing that point from my comment the rest stands. You wrote that people were "sick of hearing" about his views on gay marriage. Well all they had to do to stop hearing about it was to stop asking him about it.
You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
No, that's not what I said. Or even close to what I said.
I'd continue with you further on this, but it seems there's been a lot of gratuitous word-bending and insinuation in what you've been saying of late. That's not my style of communicating, and I don't see what I can learn from it -- but if you want to continue to feel the way you feel about the issue, that's fine with me.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the
pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't
want to feel that they were lending credibility to it,
by having him at the head of an organization they were a
part of.
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin".
Can you please explain how this could possibly mean anything other than "The CEO of Mozilla must not hold the viewpoint 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' because then it is implied that the members of the Mozilla community endorse that view". Because the logical consequence of that position is that Eich must either 1) renounce his view or 2) be removed.
Nobody protested Eich for privately "holding" a particular point of view. Their concern was around his donating money (and implicitly, legitimacy) to groups they felt were engaged in various harmful activities (running TV ads with derogatory rhetoric, for example).
The two phenomena are very different. You understand this - yes?
And so then we're back to demanding that a defeated political opponent repent. "Here is our political issue, you advocated against it, you lost, so now you must beg our forgiveness or lose your job which is completely unrelated to the issue."
Like I said, that's not the world I want to live in. If others like it they are welcome to it, but then they shouldn't start complaining if abortion-rights advocates are fired from their jobs in the American South.
Do you think that this corporate executive will be hired in a similar role from which he was let go? If not, how is this functionally different from a blacklist (or "conspiracy in restraint of trade")?
Since he is currently CEO of a technology company, I don't think it's anything like an industry blacklist, in effect (obviously, its nothing like it in structure, either.)
Being forced to leave one of the most influential software developers, and go start a new small startup is comparable to being forced out of the major studios and starting your own. I fail to see any significant difference between what happened at Mozilla and the Hollywood blacklist.
I'm not a master enough of this subject to form a detailed argument, but I hope we can agree there is a line somewhere between civil criticism and a lynching.
Especially, IMO, in the case of a ballot issue. Are we trying to coerce people to vote the way we want them to? That's unconscionable to me.
> I'm not a master enough of this subject to form a detailed argument, but I hope we can agree there is a line somewhere between civil criticism and a lynching.
Yes, there is, and what Eich experienced was not only not a lynching [0], it was quite far from the line that separates criticism from lynching.
Other people in this thread have already expressed my opinion far more eloquently than I could have. But I am wondering, do you think the protests that lead to the resignation of Claremont McKenna's dean is appropriate (besides the legalistic sense)? And if not, why is it different from the pressure that lead Brandon Eich to resign?
If you're a CEO and you're purposely creating a toxic work environment by continuously saying racist things to your workers, then obviously, you deserve to get fired.
But hell no you should not deserve to get fired for donating to the Republican Party. You have the right to donate to whichever LEGAL organization you want.
Free speech does not mean freedom from having your speech acts criticized (quite the opposite; it includes freedom of others to criticize your speech acts.) And, yes, it means that your speech acts may affect your ability to hold a job where you are one of the major public faces of an organization (such as its CEO) and are not capable of dealing with the PR resulting from the association of those speech acts with a public face of the corporation (the same as it would if you couldn't deal with any other PR issue affecting the corporation, even if it wasn't resulting from your speech acts.)