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Comment by timavr | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure work is the right place to express your opinions on controversial topics.

It is different though sharing your thoughts/interest with people you trust at work.

Also there is assymetry of impact of ideas between two sides.

Independent person would probably say that conservative ideas are Perceived to be more controversial by other side then other way around.

Like gun debate. If co-worker comes to work and says guns are bad. Ok whatever your opinion man. But if they come to work and like yo guns are awesome, 2nd amendment bros. I own one, then for other side this person might be perceived as threat.

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It's a little bit different if your job is to design and build a product intended to be arbiters of free speech, and the govt is pressuring your industry and company specifically to maybe take a heavier hand in moderating... In that case your job probably largely involves thinking through and talking through these issues with open-minded peers, wherein lies the rub

If someone shares an anti-gun opinion, it could be construed that they do not think people should have a right to effective self-defense, which could also be perceived as a threatening position.

  conservative ideas are Perceived to be more controversial by other side then other way around

You're saying that conservatives are more open-minded than the other side, then.

Though it gets murky when it's standard-fare for your coworkers to have Twitter accounts blasting their extreme leftist ideological beliefs. Or perhaps you take issue with one-sided moderation policy that bans syndicated political cartoonists but consistently allows violent threats against conservatives like Dana Loesch - but bringing up such concerns would get you railroaded out of the company like James Damore. Real-world examples of individuals who have had their careers destroyed by just questioning the moral majority creates a hostile work environment, self-censorship, and ultimately mediocrity as your company blindly alienates potentially half its U.S. consumer-base and decays into irrelevance.

That sort of scenario works itself out in the end, so it's fine by me.

there is a big difference between, i like to shoot guns in the woods on weekends and gun ranges so i can learn to defend myself and lets arm kindergarten teachers to prevent school shootings

the second makes me question your judgement, but that is exactly the sort of discussions going on in politics today

> Independent person would probably say that conservative ideas are Perceived to be more controversial by other side then other way around.

I would argue said person isn't actually "independent" then.

> this person might be perceived as threat

Only by a hysterical person.

>Only by a hysterical person.

This is incredibly insulting, especially since you've thrown it out curtly with no explanation. While I personally am not threatened by a person voicing their gun enthusiasm at work (giving all benefit of the doubt to the hypothetical gun enthusiast, e.g. it's not an out-of-the-blue zealous fervor), but I can easily imagine a non-hysterical person feeling threatened if they have zero experience with gun owners and zero context with which to personally relate to gun owners. Try to have at least a little understanding of other people whose experiences are not your own.

I was responding to

> If co-worker comes to work and says guns are bad. Ok whatever your opinion man. But if they come to work and like yo guns are awesome, 2nd amendment bros. I own one, then for other side this person might be perceived as threat.

If you genuinely feel like you have been threatened by the above to the extent that your work is now an unsafe place for you so conservatives should keep any chat about their guns to themselves, I'm sorry, but you are having an extreme emotional response disconnected from reason. Aka hysterical.

> I can easily imagine a non-hysterical person feeling threatened if they have zero experience with gun owners and zero context with which to personally relate to gun owners

Look, I can see how someone might have been brainwashed to find all guns so scary that the concept of someone near them who isn't a police officer having access seems like a direct threat to them...just like I can see someone being so brainwashed as to view all African-Americans as innately dangerous and feeling unsafe working with them. But in both cases I'd claim you are being irrational to an extreme sufficient to call your reaction hysterical.

> work is the right place to express your opinions on controversial topics.

This shuts down all discussion of controversial topics. If you're not allowed to discuss how those controversial topics can impact your work environment and customers then you're running down a very slippery slope of biasing your company against customers who similarly hold controversial viewpoints.

> Independent person would probably say that conservative ideas are Perceived to be more controversial by other side then other way around.

This is a biased opinion.

> for other side this person might be perceived as threat.

Controversial topics aren't limited to politics and feeling threatened can go both ways.

I happen to own a gun and am pro-second-amendment. I feel threatened by people who are not trained to use guns.

What about cars? I feel threatened by people who brag about racing. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or sex. But that's the easy stuff that "everyone" (well, mature people IMO) knows not to talk about at the office.

But then there's the other things. The things that relate to work.

I definitely feel threatened when a coworker talks about customers in a derogatory manner, especially when it's my boss. Employees can be customers too.

I feel threatened when someone at the office talks about how we're increasing the margins by cutting corners somewhere. I have empathy for customers and I don't want our product's quality reduced.

If I don't feel my job security would be safe if I spoke up, then my coworker talking about that will make me feel threatened.

You feel threatened by people talking about smoking?

Talking about not so much, but actively participating in yes.

I grew up in a Mormon family where smoking was not only taboo but very strongly punished.

Even second-hand smoke can cause medical problems.

If I can't tell my coworkers that I don't appreciate them smoking -- even outside of the building -- anywhere I can smell it then that's going to cause problems for me.

> I feel threatened by people who are not trained to use guns.

This is a strained and bizarre argument and requires unpacking for me to understand, unless you meant it as hyperbole.

I enjoy shooting safely, but I can't imagine feeling threatened by someone's lack of firearms training in an office workplace.

The only way to feel threatened by some e without firearms training is if the untrained person is armed. Then that’s very reasonable.

Same as I’m not threatened that no one at my work knows how serve fugu, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re not serving me fugu.

...which proves the point. If you feel threatened by someone else's lack of training, it's only in the context where they are carrying a gun to work. I would hope that most reasonable people would agree that the majority of tech employees would feel less threatened by non-carrying coworkers than the opposite.

  This is a strained and bizarre argument

Perhaps a rephrasing would help.

If you don't know how guns operate, then you are incapable of rendering it safe or even recognizing if it can be fired. (Thankfully, Lynette Fromme didn't know how to operate an autoloader, else Gerald Ford probably would have been killed.)

An analogy: even if one doesn't care to drive, one should know how to shut off an ignition and know how to operate the brakes in an emergency.

Right - which makes it completely irrelevant for workplace safety. If I'm a Twitter employee, I should not need to know how to "render a firearm safe" for my fellow employees to feel non-threatened.

For cops or security contractors, sure

Allow me to clarify. This is kind've a ramble and I am stretching different related thoughts together.

I live in Texas now. Before moving here, I lived in California. There's a stark difference of opinion about guns between the states. In California, guns are... well they're definitely not part of the culture there.

I never fired a gun until I was 23 years old and hung out with a friend-in-law at their home away from the city. A few years later I bought my first gun and went to the range. The people at the range were somewhat reserved, somewhat mocking about lack of experience. They definitely didn't appreciate people who didn't know all the rules like the back of their hand. That definitely doesn't encourage someone to learn how to handle a gun. Interesting, yes?

So, being in Texas, where guns are part of the culture in many places, it's also interesting to find people who've never fired a gun. It's scary to find people who think that the only people who should own a gun are the armed forces.

In my experience, that latter is a statement generally comes from people who are naive about US history and their government; or they have been emotionally damaged by guns which I can respect even if I disagree.

However, someone who's not been around guns, doesn't know the difference between various "basic" types of guns (automatic, semi-automatic, manual; rifle, shotgun, pistol; etc) makes me feel threatened when they start talking about what you can or can not do with a gun. The information they talk about is usually wrong and they're not usually willing to listen to corrections. I work with scientists; someone who isn't trained and isn't willing to be trained is a threat to science.

Finally, someone who talks about something with no training or experience is worse than someone who does. Imagine a computer user who's not trained to write software but talks as if databases are "the worst". Sure you could ignore them. But remember that that person can also talk to more people than just you. They could be spewing the same nonsense to their government representatives. If the representative or political leader doesn't have two brain cells (which seems common these days), they're just as likely to write bad legislation or policy about computers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hguns.

Having lived in both California and Texas I can definitely say that I've seen many opinions first-hand. There's no "right" opinion. There's definitely wrong opinions though.

I've fired guns too, it's a nice adrenalin rush and I felt very powerful. Uncomfortably powerful. It's ok if you like these feelings, but your comments seem like thin justifications. You can get these feelings without rampant gun ownership.

I have fired a gun and did not feel any strange emotions about it. To me, it is just a tool, no different from a knife om terms of emotion.

> But if they come to work and like yo guns are awesome, 2nd amendment bros. I own one, then for other side this person might be perceived as threat.

How do you think that "Yo, Marxism is awesome" would be perceived by someone who grew up in a communist slave state? Or even someone familiar with the history of Marxist governments in the 20th Century?

It's amusing to read Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier in 2018 and learn that 100 years ago bolshevism was in big fashion among the English bourgeois youth, and Lenin was considered one of the greatest men alive. This is even after the revolution and the Red Terror. Time is a flat circle.

Either way, I personally don't want legislation to ban people from talking or promoting nazism or leninism. Let bad ideas be defeated in the arena of conversation, I don't need my feelings protected from hearing something I dislike and strongly disagree with.

> Or even someone familiar with the history of Marxist governments in the 20th Century?

There were no Marxist governments in the 20th Century, and if you believe otherwise you've been duped (perhaps indirectly) by Leninist propaganda.

As is often the case, the proliferation of modifiers negates the original sense: Marxism-Leninism vs Marxism.

Ah, yes. The old "but that wasn't REAL Marxism" line.

So tell me, why is it that whenever someone attempts to institute a Marxist government, the invariable outcome is slavery, starvation, and mass murder? We have dozens of examples, dude.

And the invariable outcome is invariably followed by some apologist like you who claims "that wasn't real Marxism".

After so many attempts, one can only conclude that either, yes, it is "real Marxism" or that "real Marxism" is impossible to implement.

Sorry, guy. We're not going to let you murder another hundred million people.

> So tell me, why is it that whenever someone attempts to institute a Marxist government, the invariable outcome is slavery, starvation, and mass murder?

No one has ever instituted a government intended to be Marxist, with or without those ends.

I'm not even sure there's been a major effort to institute Marxist government, even if it failed to institute a government, since the time of Marx and Engels.

Leninism, which rejects key aspects of Marxism (particularly, it's essential prerequisite conditions and it's basic methods) but sells itself as Marxism (hence my line about people believing Marxist governments have exist being dupes of Leninism) has been attempted with the results you describe.

The closest thing that has actually been put into practice to Marxism (which still isn't Marxism, differing in roughly the opposite direction but lesser degree than does Leninism) is the modern mixed economy that has displaced the 19th century system Marx named “capitalism” throughout the developed world, which was both shaped by (largely through Marxist influence on Western labor movements) and which incorporates several elements of Marx’s platform and compromises versions of some others elements of that platform, when compared to the 19th Century capitalism it displaced.

> After so many attempts, one can only conclude that either, yes, it is "real Marxism" or that "real Marxism" is impossible to implement.

The latter is closer to the truth; at least, it seems politically impossible to achieve support for a radical transition to Marxism in a state which had acheived the prerequisite state Marx identifies as essential. While both building class consciousness on some level in the working class and using it as a lever to move the State in a direction closer Marxism is possible (and, indeed, seems to have near-universally occurred in states meeting Marx’s criteria), and Marx seems also to have been accurate in both suggesting that such incremental change would be leveraged by capitalists to forestall revolution and would be precarious and eternally at risk of backsliding spurred by the capitalist class, the revolutionary alternative Marx proposed seems impractical in practice.

This is a laughable argument, considering most Communists/Socialists I see on Twitter love using hammer-and-sickle (one could argue it's a pre-Soviet symbol, but so is swastika. most people associate it with USSR, it was on the flag of USSR, so it's a symbol of USSR). Most of them would rush to defend Soviet human rights abuses when called out on it. Hell, we had Goldsmiths student body defending Gulags a few days ago. You aren't fooling anyone.

> This is a laughable argument, considering most Communists/Socialists I see on Twitter love using hammer-and-sickle

Well, obviously the ones using that symbol are particularly visible (never seen a non-Communist socialist use it, though obviously the unadorned Red Flag is common), and certainly there are no shortage of genuine followers of Leninism and it's offshoots (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.); the fact that they exist and like to claim to be Marxist doesn't make their theory compatible with Marx’s, though,and there are plenty of actual Marxists, too.

> You aren't fooling anyone.

I'm not really sure how any of what you posted is a counterargument to anything I've said.

Exactly, "controversial" is a mostly relative notion, almost always with respect to the local majority opinion.

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