Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
This happened during the BLM protests this summer in St. Loius. The looters she reported were blocks away from any BLM protest, and other looting bands were setting fires on nearby blocks.
Frederick was a vocal advocate and financial supporter of BLM and had attended protests in the past. Didn't stop the hordes from calling her racist and threatening to ruin the careers of agents who dared to work for her literary agency, and authors represented by her.
Her agency was gutted. All over calling 911 to report people crashing a van into a small business to raid it.
(Edited to add: I worked in publishing for years. I left because of the censorship in the arena. And I'm a proud lefty.
It's gotten really crazy. Authors getting death threats. Books literally ripped off the shelves and destroyed. (No, not rabid white supremacist books. Books by PoC authors.) But industry professionals insist this is NOT censorship, just business decisions. And if you disagree? You're a dirty, filthy -ist.)
Another edit to add links to the incidents I was referring to:
Black author/illustrator team had their book ripped off shelves and pulped: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/25/censorship-chi...
Asian author was threatened and intimidated into cancelling the publication of her novel: https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/ya-twitter-forces-rising-sta...
Black author was intimidated into cancelling publication of book: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
I can think of 10+ more books that belong on this list. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe that's part of what makes things get so extreme on those sites. The most reasonable people know enough not to risk their livelihoods by jumping in and posting, and that leaves the less reasonable people to just sit there and escalate.
I've witnessed it happen to a colleague early on in my career. He posted how trivial it was to cause an IoT device to reset because they had a reset password only protected by hashing an English word that they changed every update. There are multiple security lapses there, and he didn't even mention the really scary ones, this one was almost silly.
Turns out the parent company of the IoT device and his parent company were the same, and calls got made, his post misunderstood by management, and he got told to find a new job somewhere else.
Still makes my blood boil, and I'd name names, but neither company exists anymore. It did teach me to be _very_ careful what I post online, even when I'm anonymous.
It would just be your friend that got an (admittedly mandatory) wake-up call - other employees would too. The best remedy is just a totally neutral post/tweet detailing what happened, with no judgement at all - 3rd parties will get angry on your behalf, and a lack of initial anger will only motivate that moreso.
His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight.
This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist.
The authors involved in these threats and book-burning talk had literally no punishment. None. Just a bunch of new followers who gushed about what "strong women" they were. (As a woman, I can't think of anything weaker than threatening to burn a book and harass someone, all for internet points.)
The thing is, Publishing Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left. You can talk about harassing people, burning books, and purposely destroying careers. Zero consequences at all.
But if you're so much as a hair right of center left? Forget it. Your career is gone.
Yeah, I remember that one. Link to Scott's interview that infuriated those authors is here: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child...
Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.
But I am not okay with unleashing random internet people on a mentally ill person, which could easily spiral into a mob that involves death threats, doxing of personal info, etc. Hell, I'm not okay doing that to a mentally healthy person.
“It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.”
“They love this—the school uniform, the flash of seventeen-year-old legs.”
The first quote is a pretty direct attack at the Hunger Games. HG has a rabid following so that was risky. The second is just godawful writing. He still would have been okay but he went a little too far mocking the amount of talent needed to write YA.
Scooter Braun recently learned a lesson about screwing with media that rabid young adults identify with. It’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, bring better prose. Or at least accept that the genre’s bestsellers are way better at the internet than you are.
I think it’s time we start calling out the social media mobbing for what it really is: hateful.
The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism.
And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously.
And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.
The very sad, unfortunate thing is that a lot of these authors are indeed mentally ill. A lot of the ring-leaders of these mobs openly embrace their mental illness as a personality trait (ie: listing it in their Twitter bios).
It leads to this bizarre environment where their reactions are, medically speaking, insane (ie: the reaction of someone in bipolar mania, the reaction of someone suffering from paranoia or extreme anxiety.) But there are so many insane reactions, that it becomes normalized.
And then people who don't struggle with mental illness start to mimic the insane behavior, because hey, everyone else is doing it! And it's now the best way to get internet points, collect followers, and get some profitable attention to your own books.
I believe you're having some selective memory issues. This was back in 2015, when "Hunger Games" was starting to lose steam. And many feminists on twitter were lampooning it for focusing on romance, and having a flimsy love triangle, when the life-or-death situation of the book wouldn't realistically allow for that.
Mocking the "Hunger Games" and any book with a love triangle was totally in vogue.
>He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences.
It's funny, because I've seen dozens of YA authors sneer at "Fifty Shades of Grey." Call it toxic, poorly written, laugh at it, mock it, insist it was dangerous to even publish it.
Yet I've never seen the Fifty Shades of Grey fanbase, or any Romance genre authors, talk about threatening, stalking, and publicly heckling those authors who criticize the work.
You call it "predictable consequences." I call it "hateful, disturbing, potentially dangerous behavior that reeks of censorship."
That interview was the first time that anyone had taken any notice of Bergstrom. So then, everyone read his excerpt.
(Incidentally, that’s a bad flow in writing. If your press insults an entire genre, your excerpt better be damned flawless. This goes 100x if you’re talking YA.)
The first paragraph delivers a really traditional out of touch old dude description of the Hunger Games. That’s treading on dangerous territory because you’re dealing with a universe that young people have become deeply invested in.
The second quote violates one of the genre’s rules about writing women.
So, you’ve got a writer who signed a big contract and a film deal. His introduction to his genre’s fans was an absolute disaster. So, the genre’s fans did what they always do and made a huge mess.
Some might call it disproportionate but then they don’t understand the genre either. YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.
All of that should make everyone seriously question whether this is a Paramount growth hack. Heaven knows Paramount wouldn’t be the first company to try to create controversy when they own rights to a book.
I think you are entirely missing the point of these comments, which is: the "disproportionate reactions" of the YA community are hateful, bizarre, mob-like, and often dip into censorship.
You're also stating that the "genre's fans" are to blame. As the comments above clearly state, the criticism in this thread is toward the professional authors who take part in these mobs. Not the "young people."
1) This excerpt is written from the POV of a snarky, troubled 17-year-old girl. Very different from the author himself saying these things.
2) I can excuse 14-year-old fangirls losing their minds over the Hunger Games and lashing out at anyone who criticizes it.
I can not excuse 35-year-old adults encouraging their huge following to harass the author and cheering on the idea of burning his books.
What’s scary is that this behavior is now acceptable. As long as it’s against group X
>> Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked at him thoughtfully.
> Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits as being of very much the same proportions. Oddly enough, the movie shows Sam as more or less the same build when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mordor, even though he had some weeks of semi-starvation.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any...
It's early in the book.
Samwise did hard physical work regularly, and Meriadock and Pippin while also somewhat pampered (remember, of the four hobbit, only Sam wasn't nobility!) were somewhat known for their adventures.
For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.
Many on the right still can't, even now.
If you want your philosophy to remain legal, acting like this is a very bad thing and not something that can really be excused - for any reason - might be a good start.
If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything.
But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.
Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better.
Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital.
Same issues, same dynamic, different context.
The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on.
The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.
Kinda hard to be authoritarian if one of your central beliefs is in the fraternity and equality of all. It's more useful to describe Stalinist USSR or Maoist China as right-wing regimes cloaked in leftist rhetoric.
This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)
All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.
Critical race theory has more in common with National Socialism than with the leftist values of equality and solidarity, because when you get past the verbal subterfuge which ostensibly denies that race exists, you find a deeply racist ideology of racial collectives locked in a struggle for supremacy, with one particular collective singled out as evil beyond redemption and in need of destruction. We have seen that before, and it is undeniable where it must lead. Critical Race Theory is Nazism barely disguised by a light sprinkling of leftist pixie-dust.
The common factor between the extremes of left and right is collectivism. Totalitarian demagogues, left or right, favor collectivism as a tool of control because it detaches people from their moral obligations to other individual human beings and transfers their loyalties wholly to an abstraction controlled by that demagogue.
I don't know how we get out of this. I can't think of a good way to encourage empathy over outrage, as the former is often too painful and the latter often too enjoyable. In the information age it is far too easy to find the hedonistic outrage-dens, and there's a lot of money to be had running such places.
Speaking of likening echo chambers to opium dens, the Rat Park[0] experiments suggest that environment does play a significant role in drug-seeking behavior, and it does seem that a lot of this extremism can be traced back to things like the increasing wealth-gap, the hollowing out of rural America, systemic racism, rampant political corruption, and other societal ills. Therefore, maybe it isn't necessary to address the symptom of extremism directly --by, say, trying to teach people empathy-- but instead focus on treating the underlying illnesses. Of course, since our politicians are elected by the people they represent, and it would seem far easier to manipulate people's outrage for votes than to focus on actually fixing things, that might not be possible either.
Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do.
This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, there are clear distinctions between various left-wing ideologies and mainstream liberalism (radical or not). Finger pointing and blaming individuals, the type of behavior your describing, is classic dominant capitalist ideology, something that all flavors of the left are deeply skeptical of.
Both "radical" liberalism and rising right-wing extremism are different varieties of nihilism, stemming from the same root cause of a degradation in our overall material conditions and the breakdown of late capitalist society. Both are essentially empty systems of rhetoric with no underlying values that ultimately lead to a totalitarian way of thinking.
To reiterate, the thinking your describing is absolutely not "far left".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
Note that the targets of cancel culture are in the most proper sense "class enemies" since their sins are not directed against specific individuals but entire classes of people: blacks, women, transsexuals, etc.- and can be as vague as dismissive attitudes or generic antagonism.
Indeed. Graffiti in the wake of a recent riot read: "Liberals get the bullet too "
Closest thing I've ever had to a social media presence is here on HN, where I deliberately remain anonymous.
Social media without moderators was a really bad idea, as we learn now.
Also try not to be doxable in general but sucks like when YT forces you to use your actual name in comments otherwise changing it would change it in email. Can make another account too. At least the comments I don't think are indexed publicly.
That's always fun finding dumb things you posted online as a kid.
The older I get, the more I understand the push for a right to be forgotten. I wish that (most?) public sites had some kind of filter where things disappeared. There is no reason why comments made as a kid should follow you forever. Or, if not entirely removed, then maybe the authorship masked.
I mean, if bad decisions fall off your credit report after 7 years, why shouldn’t the stupid tweet you posted 7 years ago? This is especially true for accounts where the person was under 18 at the time.
Well, people can delete ill-advised tweets, but it doesn't matter - if somebody else screen-shotted it, they can hang on to the screenshot for as long as they like and use it against you when you run for congress some day.
I'm very, very thankful that the internet didn't exist when I was a kid. And am very worried for my own children because it did when they were - I've been counseling them since they were old enough to use a computer that whatever they write will be there forever.
Only use social-media as a read-only medium, or for marketing.
Anything you say there can, and will, be used against you in the court of public opinion, FOREVER.
On other sites, such as HN and reddit, retire your username after a few weeks / months. Your internet points don't matter.
See also: https://www.socialcooling.com/
I’m as left as they come, but I don’t trust that the winds won’t change or I will make a stupid decision, and my future is too important to risk that. And honestly I’m not missing much. If I want to talk politics, I do it with my friends over a beer.
As a former Soviet citizen, this is particularly funny to me. Where the safest place for political discussion was at home, in the kitchen, with vodka and couple of good friends. It was part of Soviet culture back then.
While not anywhere nearly that extreme, it makes me nervous that we're moving in that direction culturally (where it's socially acceptable and encouraged to turn someone in for having the "wrong" thoughts).
This is literal victim blaming. US culture leaders have deep and worsening problems that need to be discussed openly.
Alas, it seems this thread was flagged. Ironic given the content. But I'll continue to share that article about the purity spiral with others, it captures a lot of the things I've seen quite well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/05/11/dc-...
ETA: Since then, she’s also been able to leverage that experience into redemption/victimhood profiles on Good Morning America and an article in Elle UK. Both opportunities I guarantee she never would have had with her debut novel, so she’s fine.
The no-eating rule is a fairly big deal on Metro. A twelve-year-old girl was famously arrested for eating a single French fry [0], in a case (Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the arrest was upheld. A teenager was arrested in 2016 for carrying chips and snacks into a Metro station [1]. If I saw an employee flouting this rule, I’d be indignant too. I wouldn’t have posted a photo of the person, but the kind of vitriol, racism, and naked hate this novelist faced in response to her tweet was totally unwarranted. The potential for negative consequences on the part of the Metro employee was greatly exaggerated.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94999&page=1
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...
That said, if it's true that metro passengers have effectively been harassed and abused and arrested for years over this no-eating rule, then I can see how it would be more offensive to see an employee breaking it publicly, and this person's reaction makes more sense to me.
But in doing so they have become what they hated. They are now actively helping maintain and rooting for the stupid rule instead of fighting against it.
I see no compromise of principle in people who maintain and enforce stupid rules they disagree with. The most honest response is to argue for and support sensible rules, not to turn a blind eye.
I'm not saying that I think it is a good idea to follow bad rules - but people who disagree with rules and follow them anyway on solid moral footing and should reasonably expect others to do the same.
it's been my experience that people generally don't follow rules they disagree with, unless they are afraid of the consequences. As such, seeing someone breaking the rule who is also someone in power over them with ability to enforce the rule can be especially galling.
Moreover, the Metro had been ordered to cease citing people for jumping fares or eating on the train in 2019. I appreciate the author may not have known that. She still had no reason to use her clout to publish a photo of the employee and call her her to be punished. She was literally snitching someone and then cried tears of sorrow when she was snitched on back. I’m really struggling to garner sympathy in this particular case, although again, I don’t defend or condone the hate she received in return.
She also sued the publisher (an extremely small outfit with two employees) over canceling her book and they wound up publishing it anyway out of fear of litigation. She also tried to sue the distributor (Rare Bird, which is also small), who she didn’t have a contract with (these were the people that commented publicly they wouldn’t distribute it), but wound up dropping the case. I’m not trying to drag her for having a book deal with a boutique imprint, I just think it’s important to realize that this wasn’t Hachette or Simon & Schuster, this was an imprint with two employees.
And she then leveraged her experience to get positive international coverage/redemption arc. And you know what, if GMA and Elle UK want to buy into her narrative, kudos to her for selling it. But it really goes against the idea that her life was ruined, when again, she was able to place sympathetic stories about herself with Hearst (Elle UK) and ABC News (GMA).
Reporting it privately is still "narcing", isn't it? You're saying she'd have been ok if she kept her anonymity while doing the snitching that the twitter mob seeks to "cancel" people for? Well sure.
It's perfectly reasonable to think one or both is wrong while still thinking one is far worse than the other.
The adoption of “no snitching” culture well outside of its original contexts confuses me somewhat, but also in this case, how is this a situation someone should even concern themselves with? The entire thing is baffling to me: the original tweet, the Twitter mob against herself and firing afterward. Just seems out of this world.
Exactly. She knew better and was sophisticated enough to discern what was proportionate to the situation.
To be fair, the DC metro is among the cleanest in the NE USA. It's not North Korea clean, but it's far better than NYC and Philly. The reason it's clean is because the system does a decent job of policing the trains and hires enough people to keep it clean.
I've seen people eat entire large pizzas on NY subways, I've seen people eat massive wet smelly hoagies in Philly and deliberately plop a handful of the onions on the floor of the train like it was nothing. I can at least understand her outrage, but she could have handled it differently.
Maybe she took the "if you see something, say something" directive a bit too seriously?
As for “vitriol, racism, and naked hate”, is that not just standard stuff on social media? Any tweet that goes viral for better or worse will get it.
I couldn't care less about how strict the rule is, highlighting your disagreement with it by shitting on the little guy isn't a good look.
In this case, the original post didn't pass the sniff test to me. If I tweeted:
"Hey $operator, the person manning the gate at the station at James Street this morning was really rude, yelling at people and telling them to f-off"
I can't see any situation where the skin color of that person would come into it, so how would it be possible to get someone fired "because they're black" when that information isn't even made available.
Perhaps a black employee is more likely to get a complaint about rudeness. If so, the race wasn’t made available but still changed the interaction.
That's not cancel culture. That's common sense. Don't make your coworkers so angry that they'd rather be jobless than spend time in your presence.
The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences. Frederick spoke her mind in a public square, and signed her name to those statements, and other people freely chose not to associate themselves with her. That's bound to happen from time to time. It's a free country.
What is being said, however, is that we should reverse this spiralling cultural trend of thinking it's OK to rail-road/strong-arm those not on your "side".
It's a base, mob instinct that has caused riots, factionalism, witch hunts and genocide all throughout human history. It's arguably responsible for a lot of the damage in US society in recent years
I mean, her employees quit because she posted on Twitter that a business was being looted and someone should call the police (I believe, the original tweet seems to have been deleted). Resigning over something so innocuous surely points to a disturbingly reductionist world view, and that path leads only to violence.
This is it. In the last 10 years or so mob instinct has shown up in many ways - in looting stores, in doxing people and cancelling people who say the wrong things, in trying to overthrow governments, or just simple pile-ons. In part this has been fanned by big tech, but not entirely
The trick is tackling the causes of the creation of the mobs. "You're either with us or against us" is not new - Clinton and Bush were using it 20 years ago, but Cicero used it in Rome and it's in the bible. Big Tech is certainly a key part of the creation and expanse as it connects people, and people are encouraged to "pick a side". In traditional discourse what you'd say to your sportsmates up the pub could be a very different conversation to what you say to your collegues at an awayday. With social media, what you say to one, you say to all -- walking between worlds is difficult.
You might agree with group A on one thing (say housing), and group B on another thing (say BLM), and group C on another thing (say economy), but if those don't all align with your side, you won't fit in.
Police shoot someone dead. There should, at the very least, be a reliable public inquiry into each one of these incidents. We could treat it as an air accident or a murder inquiry, either would work; but instead, there is nothing. Over the years, the anger about being exposed to the risk of being shot dead without consequences boils over, and suddenly there is fighting in the streets and on Twitter. The way to "reverse the trend" is for justice to be seen to be done within the system, so people don't go outside the system. After all, there's no way to end calls for people to be fired without infringing free speech.
Is calling the police on somebody making a death threat? That's how SWATting came to be a problem, after all.
And declaring war on policing is a horrific response to the (huge) problem of under 0.1% of interactions having inexcusably terrible outcomes. Lack of policing causes far more problems than policing. And if you disagree with that, do you deserve to lose your job for your good faith belief? The anti-policing extremists hurt the people they intend to help. The vast majority of Black communities don't want to cancel the current police as a whole, they want better police.
Happens probably every day somewhere, why has this even become noteworthy?
Nobody anywhere would care a single bit were there not mass hysteria.
Also it's not necessarily harassment to call out people if they are not doing their jobs. It's just very (almost pathetically) petty.
Trying to discuss in good faith here so hopefully this doesn't garner venom: it doesn't feel novel to be fired or quit over public perception of actions or statements - all my corporate employers since the onset of social media have had disclaimers to not enter the public discourse in such a way that might cause negative publicity for them.
>Nobody anywhere would care a single bit were there not mass hysteria.
This is what my original comment was getting at: claims of 'mass hysteria' come off as something like a conspiracy against a specific group or unfairly targeted wrong-think, which feels like a much more exciting answer than the mundane reality. It seems hysterical in itself to not just assume we're in a politically polarized climate and certain topics of discourse easily earn you close friends and/or committed enemies - something that can make any group dynamic fall apart.
>Also it's not necessarily harassment to call out people if they are not doing their jobs. It's just very (almost pathetically) petty.
Entirely agree! I do think social media has had a tendency to allow people to indulge in their worst sides without much consequence in the case of doxxing and, well, harassment by mass-reaching out to personal lines of contact. That's really distinct in my eyes from filing a complaint to their public employer for the public perception of their public statements.
I think frankly it's driven a small group of unimportant people, causing more serious forces to act out of fear or opportunity, which snowballs into overreaction.
A 'fear' moves over a group of people causing weird effects.
Maybe we need a term for this - but how do we have 'serious consequences' out of essentially 'inconsequential acts'?
It's leveraged consistently by those that want to use 'every little interaction' as 'proof' of their particular ideology.
It's just too much, it's wearing on my otherwise sympathetic view of people.
That's unfair but it's not a sign of hysteria, other than for the general shittiness of viral internet communication.
As for not being mass hysteria, from the outside looking in it's clearly exactly that. Firing someone because of a mobile app they have installed, when that app was briefly at the top of the app store, is ludicrous and wrong.
The US left appear to be descendeding into full bore anti-conservative hysteria. This is exceptionally dangerous because when the left has taken power in the past with that kind of mentality it ended up in bloodshed on massive scales. That must not happen to America.
The corporate actors involved here are nowhere near the left, they are closer to the center-right; the problem the Trumpist faction is facing isn’t that the Left doesn’t like them, its that they’ve earned the firm enmity of the centrist factions that, even when they opposed conservatives them on certain issues, kept good relations with them because they knew the next day they might need them as allies against the Left. And, beyond that, they’ve also lost a substantial minority of the Right; the various long-time and recent Republican figures that have come out in opposition to the Trumpist faction – and not just in the usual intraparty opposition sense but to the extent of either making a dramatic exit from the Party and/or advocating for the defeat of not only its Presidential candidate but of its downballot candidates as long as the Party adheres to Trumpism is telling.
Shouting about the Left is, I’m sure, cathartic, but it is also very much irrelevant to what is going on here. That’s not where the change that is driving outcomes comes from.
I expect this to change once Trump is gone and mainstream liberals aren’t so terrified of being compared to him.
I personally take issue with his heavy-handed approach to the George Floyd protests, but I consider George Bush Jr to be by far the worse president between the two. He's mostly just an arrogant asshole.
The left's response to him however... And I've spoken with many many other centrists online who agree with me so it's not clear to me why you think the centrists are anything but just silent so they don't get swept up in the hysteria (which is where I've been at for years now, which is why I've never been on Twitter, instagram, etc. Was on FB briefly and promptly left it long before it got popular to do so).
I wouldn't single out any particular faction on this to be honest. The Obama birther movement purportedly started in 2004 and Trump himself peddled the narrative that Obama wasn't a US Citizen. There was also the general narrative that Obama was the "Anti-Christ" and a secret Muslim.
Now you have a portion of the GOP who believe Democrats and "Hollywood elite" are harvesting children's adrenochromes in a massive paedophile ring.
Any argument that hysteria is the domain of one party is not based in fact.
What we're seeing now is not merely a set of hysterical beliefs, but widespread pulling on the levers of power on the basis of them. That seems pretty new.
The hysteria is literally facing HARM from opinions.
Why is death threats and intolerance noteworthy? Maybe because intolerance, hate, bigotry and threats of violence should always be noteworthy? especially when concerned with those who claim to be tolerant?
They quit likely because they are in a rep-based business and their boss is stained.
The 'mass outrage' is to some extent, outrage on them by virtue of trickle down or association.
The public outrage adds emotional momentum to it.
That the woman did something slightly questionable makes it one of the better examples of cancel culture, because were she to have done truly noting remotely wrong, then none of the actions would have any justification at all. Because there's a shade of possibly bad acting, we see the disproportional response.
Imagine if every redditor was fired or or had their employees quit because of the absolutely horrific things some other users post there.
People in East Germany were free to speak, they just got consequences.
Freedom of speech in the US means that the government can't punish you for saying something, except in situations where they can (incitement, copyright, libel, contempt of court, etc)
What you're referring to is called a constitutional amendment, which also gets pulled under the umbrella term 'Freedom of Speech' because it's a practical implementation of the ideal.
This idea that it's defensible to actively work against the ideals of Freedom of Speech because of a constitutional amendment just doesn't fly. It would be akin to me claiming it isn't immoral to cheat on my spouse because there are laws requiring lawyers to avoid breaching the trust of their clients and therefore trust isn't anything people should consider unless they're lawyers.
PoC authors in this context refers to "Persons of Color"-authors.
In hindsight it is probably clear from the context - but I didn't immediately get it. :)
Weird term. Doesn't work unabbreviated as an adjective, an adjectival formation ('coloured') is long out of politically-correct favour (at least it is in the UK), and why, is 'of colour' different/better/at all a good description of someone anyway?
I'm, er, 'without colour', so it's hardly for me to object, but I couldn't comfortably use it. Fortunately (or I suppose that's why it 'feels' off to me) nobody ('of colour' or not) here seems to.
Or maybe it's just a lesson in tone etc. being harder to convey on the internet - for ages I thought 'MeToo' was against the alleged victims, as in 'oh yeah yeah me too, I'm Brian and so's my wife'.
It's different in that it's a different phrase. It's better because it's different; terminology in this area is driven purely by fashion.
It's clear why this happens, having difficulties is viewed as undesirable, most people would choose not to have them if they could (I'm aware some people with disabilities have felt it made them who they are and wouldn't change it, but they aren't the people to start using terms in a pejorative manner). As long as there are real negative attitudes against black people and real negative effects on black people, this is likely to be the same for terms used there also.
I feel the only reason person centered language like "people of color" and "person with disabilities" has lasted so long as the acceptable phrasing is simply because the more wordy phrases are harder to turn into a playground insult/drunk jeering/etc.
I don't really have any suggestions about how this could be handled differently, just pointing out this aspect that does end up making me talk less, certainly about touchy subjects, because I'm afraid of being misinterpreted and seen in a bad light.
Edit: It's also especially bad because English isn't my native language so I might use some construct that seems "natural" to me but insulting to a native speaker
Here we have a too-common case of virtue chasers on the "same side" attacking each other because they have slightly different useless solutions to a problem. (The way you to show more respect to different people with differences is to show more respect in actions, not to play word games that the vast majority of affected people with effects don't care about.)
If anyone cared what the group being described thought about the terminology, no one would ever have tried to say "Latinx".
Like I said above, pure fashion.
I had a look, the wikipedia page[1] indicates at least in the US that the American Medical Association, United Spinal Association and various federal and state bodies recommend it as best practice, but also points out various groups for deaf and blind people disagree.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language#Rational...
1. https://www.disabled-world.com/definitions/disability-disabl...
See also the "Spastics Society", "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People", modern use of the n-word among black people, the use of "Negro" in "I have a Dream". Plenty of cases where a word in use by the group themselves becomes considered the impolite word.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_name_controver...
Approximately 97% of "Latinx" people do not identify as "Latinx".
Is there? Asians are wealthier, more educated, more upwardly mobile, less likely to be shot by the police, and live longer, than whites. As an Asian-American man, I can expect to live as long as my Irish-American wife. Latinos, meanwhile, have various disparities resulting from the character and recency of immigration, but have similar economic mobility to whites, and within 1-3 generations achieve economic parity with whites. Cubans, who came to the US as refugees with no money, achieved parity in just one generation. 60% of multiracial people, mostly white-asian and white-hispanic, identify as white, and not multiracial.
Black and Native American people, meanwhile, face persistent economic disparities that are both large and are completely unchanged since the segregation era. Almost all black-white multiracial people identify as Black or multiracial, not as white.
The constructed term "people of color" actually obscures the fundamental dynamics of American society:
1) America is incredibly successful at assimilating immigrants, white or non-white, both socially and economically. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are basically experiencing the same economic and social trajectory that Germans, Irish, Polish, Italians, etc., experienced over American history.
2) America has been unable to make any progress at eliminating economic disparities for two groups that face unique historical circumstances: Black people, and Native Americans. The term "people of color" obscures the fact that these groups are facing American experiences that are sui generis in American history.
"People of color" is strictly less useful of a term than what preceded it, "underrepresented minority." And it appears that people realize that impracticality, because you've seen the emergence of phrases like "assimilation into whiteness" or "white-adjacent" to describe Asians and economically assimilated Latinos. These are phrases (which are offensive, by the way) coined to remedy a self-inflicted problem: defining who is "privileged" in the country in terms of "whiteness" and not something that actually reflects society.
"On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire."
In practice, the term is used to de-legitimize some opinions, while upholding others.
The term "cancel culture" is cancel culture.
Firing/boycotting someone for doing nothing wrong, not even for something "offensive", but just for appearing to have some observable qualities vaguely similar to people who do offensive things, is unjustifiable.
I couldn't believe people would actually allow white supremacists to have so much power over them that they'd circumvent such a benign symbol.
Just an observation: You are "cancelling" the opinions of those who do the "cancelling." In terms of the OP, you may or may not agree with the opinion of the person who did the firing, but it was based on someone being offended. Whether or not that offense was justified, or a good enough reason to fire someone, is a different question.
It’s more complicated than this. I don’t condone any harassment but not accurately disseminating the information is the same non-nuanced mob behavior that causes the harassment in the first place.
"By Claire Kirch | May 31, 2020
The civil unrest in the Twin Cities continues to take its toll on Minnesota's literary community—sometimes in unexpected ways. Thursday evening, the night before protesters set fire to two adjoining Minneapolis indie bookstores and destroying them both, the reaction to a St. Paul–based literary agent’s tweet ended up gutting the boutique agency she owns.
Three agents affiliated with Red Sofa Literary tweeted this past weekend that they have resigned in response to owner Dawn Frederick’s tweet, leaving one subsidiary rights executive besides Frederick still employed there. Frederick's official Red Sofa account on Twitter has been removed."
"Frederick, who founded Red Sofa in 2008, is a well-known fixture in Minnesota’s vibrant literary community, serving on the board of directors of the Loft Literary Center and having launched the MN Publishing Tweet Up social group. She also supervises the team of volunteers working in the galley room during the Heartland Fall Forum regional booksellers trade show each year."
So no, this was not during the BLM protests in St. Louis as the date of the article precedes when those began. Furthermore she is a "well-known fixture in Minnesota's vibrant literary community", and has been since 2008, which is something I would have expected someone who "worked in publishing for years" to be aware of.
Throwing her name combined with BLM into search engines like google only returns results after this event, so your assertion of her advocacy is unfounded and not to be believed by the above and what follows.
"Minneapolis attorney Marshall Tanick of the Meyer, Njus, Tanick law firm emailed cease-and-desist letters on Monday to two literary agents and an author on behalf of his client, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary. The two agents are Beth Phelan of Gallt and Zacker (the email was cc’ed to that agency’s two principals) and Kelly Van Sant, who until two weeks ago worked for Red Sofa. The author is Isabel Sterling, who writes YA novels. SFF author Foz Meadows also received an email, she tweeted, but it contained multiple factual errors and was recalled by its sender."
"UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, Laura Zats, a principal of Headwater Literary Management in Minneapolis announced that she received a letter from Frederick's lawyer, threatening legal action against the agent for re-tweeting tweets by others alleging that Frederick is racist. Zats is a former employee of Red Sofa Literary, who left it last year ago to found her own agency. She has joined Phelan, Van Sant, and Sterling in their GoFundMe campaign soliciting funds in case of a lawsuit. The campaign has raised almost $15,000 to date.
Several authors have announced that they are severing their relationships with Red Sofa Literary, including Margot Atwell, the head of publishing for Kickstarter. She tweeted Thursday afternoon that she has terminated her relationship with Frederick "due to the choice she made to call the police during the protests against George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, and her subsequent decision to threaten legal action against her critics."
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
So Frederick decides to start suing people, which results in agents/authors not targeted in lawsuits to cut ties with her in part due to her legal efforts.
Had she stuck with the apology she released a few days after the tweet, instead of doubling down and even throwing lawsuits around, things would have likely been far better for her. Or even not publicly announcing she was calling the police during protests against police behavior.
In other words she's not the blameless martyr you make her out to be.
And finally cancelling is just a propaganda term on the political right to escape the negative consequences of their actions. This is evidenced by it not being applied when, say the (Dixie) Chicks criticized President Bush and had their careers largely ended. It's also not applied when the 'cancelling' is apolitical, such as a restaurateur who alienates their customers/community (think Cafe Hon from Kitchen Nightmares).
EDIT: Less than 2 minutes after this was posted it was down voted and flagged.
I found claims that IBT's other notable property, the International Business Times (which I haven't heard of), has been a content farm, but I only glossed over it.
I can't seem to find Newsweek on the Median Bias chart, but it's ranked similarly to CNN.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/newsweek-bias-and-reliability/
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Med...
My take is it's mostly accurate, but I wouldn't use it as a primary source.
The perfect example of that is Breitbart's infamous 'black crime' tag: Breitbart didn't need to invent stories, they'd just go and pick up out of the bunch of criminal prosecutions happening every single day in a country with >300 million inhabitants. But by choosing to focus on crimes committed by black people - and conveniently leaving out similar crimes committed by your average white criminal - it reaffirmed on their readers their 'intuition' that black people are clearly more inclined to commit crime.
So, you should always consider who is publishing a story and why.
"Transgender murder epidemic" is an even better example, it was completely made up by the media. Look up the numbers and compare them with the general population.
[1] https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/
And [1] is in ostensibly "liberal" New York city.
Maybe your response is ironic: I genuinely can't tell. But clearly "my every-day experience justifies my actions regardless of the facts about (my view)" is not a fair rebuttal, because anyone can make that claim about anything.
It does however feel weird in the same way that "odd female something", "odd muslim something", "odd socialist something", "odd atheist something".
Leaving out details that are not relevant is IMO smart because it helps the reader to avoid prematurely making up their mind because of irrelevant details.
So my take is tptacek should be allowed to write it and we should be allowed to point it out.
And one more thing: my respect for tptacek has been growing even if we clash from time to time in various settings.
The word I was originally going to use was the one articles about the new "Newsweek" use: "cult". But that didn't seem quite right either.
I have upvoted both of your posts that seem to be responding to me, because I much prefer a downvote and discourse to being down voted without comment.
If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
To be honest I have no idea who Newsweek were or are and if they stopped being the original group 7-8 years ago it hardly seems like you could maintain any brand loyalty if you were eroding it with wrong doing over that whole time.
These things seem germane to the discussion, though.
The organization that took over Newsweek did it with the intention to improve their own credibility by banking on the name, while removing all the people and processes that built that credibility in the first place. If it’s not an outright scam it’s certainly approaching it.
The problem here is that many of you are projecting your own brand of morals on these deals, and many people may not share that perspective.
How would you assess the accuracy of that feeling without knowing or finding out about the facts being discussed? You're saying 'I know nothing about this at all but that isn't germane because the OP is giving me a disingenuous vibe'. It's a curiously strident, stridently incurious position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Maybe aggregators like HN can leverage this list, like a pre-filter for the moderators.
It’s important to know who’s writing: The article is not an objective list of facts. They did not reach to the publication for comment. Some nuances might have been ironed out. This is true regardless of the political side talking.
Comment contradicts what is in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
Maybe ask for sources before using some random post making unverified claims as confirmation for your own biases.
I've generally taken that not to be down to malevolence but probably just down to the fact those drawn to editing it are most likely of a similar political hue to those from academia.
I should point out that there are plenty of editors who lean left that make genuine attempts to keep it out of their editing and are as frustrated as me about those who don't; I genuinely suspect it is an editor-demographics numbers thing that causes the imbalance as much as anything, as previously stated.
> I've just personally always been surprised by how neutral Wikipedia's political articles tend to be when I've read them
My experience so far is that they manage to polarize even articles unrelated to politics, I think that it is partially caused by the toxicity of the community.
Has it struck you that maybe the world is actually that way and that they prefer to be that way. Just because it isn't your way doesn't mean that you dismiss the rest of the world.
So you'll need to clarify how I'm "in the wrong lane".
> Newsweek reached out to the agency and to Oefelein for comment and will update this article with any response.
Instead, your comment to me sounds likme an apology to the ad hominem fallacy.
When an article about a tweet doesn't bother to embed the tweet, it's probably a good indication that the article itself doesn't really add anything to the topic. Firsthand accounts from _either_ of the parties here would've been significantly more valuable to us as readers.
It is the literal meaning of "virtue signalling".
Right now it's not entirely clear what all the facts are. Perhaps she really was just fired for having an account, or perhaps she posted some things that were less-than-savoury. I think the chance that a Conservative publication would do any diligence at getting at the facts of the matter is essentially zero.
A few years ago a Conservative publication had an article that they had "proof" that Conservative accounts were banned more frequently on Twitter, based on "analysis" of the data. It took me a bit of effort to find the data, and it included shining examples of Conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. Yes, literally, the American fucking Nazi Party. It included a list of a whole bunch of other similarly minded people; I wrote down a list here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette#Banning_Neo-Nazis_is...
This is a very marked example, but there have been many examples where all nuance or details were left out because it was more convenient.
This is the kind of playing field we're dealing with.
Now, I'm not saying that you should trust other publications blindly – trusting anything blindly would be foolish – but trust is not binary, and generally speaking I would trust other sources more on this topic. A Conservative publication on topics like these without details are, unfortunately, not proof of anything right now and carry very little trust.
So, do I know it's a false story? No. Do I know it's a true story? Also no. Essentially a story like this is useless outside of being a lead for further investigation.
Presumably the right-wing are just as capable (and historically have been the aggressor often), but the left have mastered it as a form recently.
As for providing some evidence of cancel culture and deplatforming, somebody would have to have been living on Mars (or have blinkers) to have missed the odious practices (as evidenced in the OP!) that the terms were invented for, and I'm not sure me spending my time googling and linking examples is going to help in that case.
Now his comments are predictably and assiduously leftist-political, and rarely on-topic to the article from what I've seen.
> The new "Newsweek" capitalizes on the brand reputation of the old one, but has no connections to it
From an external perspective it seems like the same argument could be made about the tptacek HN account. The posts from years ago which I enjoyed reading are nothing like the posts from recent history. It's like different people wrote them.
I’ve been following him on Twitter for years; and I don’t believe he had changed at all - rather HN has had more political stories as the tech sector grew.
Anyways, this is yet another reason to flag political stories on Hacker News! It blows to lose the ability to enjoy someone else's writing because you learn too much about their politics.
I find a warning that a single story might be false much less useful than a comment pointing out that the reputation of the source is no longer to be trusted.
If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
It seems like this should go without saying, but some news outlets have a better reputation for accuracy than others, and a story can be "true" in a technical sense while still being designed to further some agenda by omitting important context or facts.
I'd submit that understanding the biases and incentives of a publication are prerequisites to taking any of their content seriously. This is true of any outlet. This doesn't mean you discard outright their content, but you may view it through a more skeptical lens and seek out additional corroboration.
Cite?
EDIT:
Seems like this comment is false if wikipedia is to believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
Would not be surprising really, given what the comment is intended to do.
Waiting for that citation.
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
At no point does it say IBT is an "odd Christian sect". At no point does it say they were purchased by an "odd Christian sect". Having ties to != owned by. But you know this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:IBTIMES
https://people.com/crime/astronaut-love-triangle-nine-years-...
Today’s US is just a grand example of this at Internet scale and energized by social media. Welcome to shit throwing and the tearing off of genitals.
What you have now are threat displays to keep the losing tribe in its place. People identifying with the winning tribe feel good that there is a lesser party to trample on.
Calls for unity happen after a change in power because constant struggle is destructive. After a change in power, lesser chimps (tech) pay fealty to the new alphas (Democratic Congress and Presidency).
This whole system works because cooperation within a group allows the group as a whole to compete effectively against other groups. We are organized fractally in this way. To the victor go the spoils.
You see movement in both physical and virtual spaces. In people and in companies to different states. In people moving to different social media. People stop fighting with you, they just avoid you.
China is going to be the obvious dominant world power within Biden’s term.
What it basically describes people who:
- are opposed to the current political system (originally the Nazi regime)
- cannot speak their opinion for fear of repressions
. cannot or do not want ot leave their country
- do not want to adapt to the political system
Currently we have inner emmigration among conservatives. It is almost impossible to speak out as a conservative without fearing consequences. People are not revolting, but they are bascially done with the political system.
Yes there are extremists that like to shout, but they are in the minority or a person in riled up circumstances.
There is representation of the conservative voice both in media and the political system. There is repression, both informal and in the legal code, of Neonazi speech.
Didn’t Angela Merkel reject “multiculturalism?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/14...
Don’t you have religious education in public schools? https://www.dw.com/en/in-german-schools-opt-out-of-religion-...
Isn’t abortion still technically illegally in Germany? https://www.dw.com/en/activists-in-germany-demand-legalizati.... And as a practical matter, German abortion law would be unconstitutional for multiple reasons under our Roe v. Wade.
Part of why the American GOP has gotten so wacky is that over the past 50 years American liberals have wiped social conservatism out of the public sphere in a way that doesn’t seem to be the case in Germany. In the US, saying what Merkel did that “multiculturalism is a failure” would get you branded a Nazi. Not even Trump would say that. Saying that abortion should generally be illegal after 12 weeks gets you lumped in with religious fundamentalists.
This is due to two features of the American political system. First, our courts have taken it upon themselves to adjudicate social issues that are in Europe handled by the legislature. Second, our social conservatives are split into different parties along racial lines. The Democratic Party is a coalition, but white liberals firmly control the social platform. Biden has promised to appoint a Black women Justice. Statistically speaking half of Black women oppose same-sex marriage. Do you think there is any chance Biden will appoint a socially conservative Black woman?
If the American political system was as meaningfully accommodating of social conservatism as the German one (and I think that would require getting our courts out of the business of being social moral arbiters) I think you’d see a lot more normalcy.
First, the crosses on gov't buildings are specific to Bavaria. As the USA, Germany has a strong federal constitution which allows the states some lee-way. Furthermore the German Constitutional Court has ruled crosses in schools must be removed if parents object, a ruling that was partially overruled by the ECHR.
Second, Merkel's remarks were rather specific to a form of living together without an overarching attempt at having and enforcing core values. She did not reject other cultures or beliefs. I doubt her position would be controversial in a country with the "e pluribus unum" as part of the brand identity, but I can't really say as I don't know the USA too well.
IDK about the assessment that liberals destroyed social conservatism in the USA as it is again not my country. But from over here, it really seems like the GOP went into a tail-spin over the last decade, maybe even since Reagan. In Germany, due to our voting system, the conservative party is as much a coalition as the Democrats in the USA while the left is more splintered.
I'd say if you wanted to have a less extremist conservative party, you'd need to get rid of the FPTP voting system: it would allow the GOP to jettison the right-wing extremists and seek a ruling coalition while fighting the Democrats for centrist voters/moderate conservatives.
But if the liberals really forced the GOP into becoming a assembly of lunatics, hats off, they did a great job. I somehow doubt it, though...
That's true in theory, but the Supreme Court has taken upon itself to impose uniform standards for the whole nation. As I recall, the German Constitutional Court upheld the practice in general, reasoning that it was an expression of Germany's heritage as a Christian nation. It then balanced that principle against the potential burden on religious minorities, to fashion that compromise.
In the United States, we're not allowed to acknowledge the country's heritage as a Christian country. More important, there is generally no balancing between the cultural expression of the majority and the interests of the minority. That's a huge difference between American and German constitutional law. In German constitutional law, there is a strong balancing of minority rights against the effect of certain things on the majority. In American constitutional law, almost zero weight is given to how recognizing a minority right (such as the right to be free from feeling excluded by seeing a cross in a school house) might affect the cultural expression oof the majority.
> Second, Merkel's remarks were rather specific to a form of living together without an overarching attempt at having and enforcing core values. She did not reject other cultures or beliefs. I doubt her position would be controversial in a country with the "e pluribus unum" as part of the brand identity, but I can't really say as I don't know the USA too well.
Merkel appears to be using the term according to its typical meaning. "Multiculturalism" means you have a country with people of different cultures living together, without an attempt to impose unifying core values. And rejecting multiculturalism in that sense is controversial. Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, was attacked as a racist recently for saying the same thing. He didn't "reject other cultures or belies." As far as I can tell, he and other American conservatives use the phrase to mean exactly the same thing as Merkel does.
> In Germany, due to our voting system, the conservative party is as much a coalition as the Democrats in the USA while the left is more splintered.
It's not just the voting system, it's the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has allowed social liberals to impose policies without any coalition building, and even without building public consensus. On abortion, for example, no state is allowed to make abortion illegal before viability (20-24 weeks). This is enormously unpopular in the US (under 30% support). And presumably it's unpopular in Germany, where there is a 12-week limit absent special circumstances.
I'm just trying to paint for you a picture of why conservatives in the U.S. might be frustrated, by reference to how things are in Germany. Keep in mind, though, that Americans are much more conservative than Germans to begin with! Less than 10% of Germans pray daily. For Americans, it's 50%, similar to Turkey!
Germany obviously makes political concessions to Christians and social conservatives. There is (opt-out) religious education in schools, abortion is limited mainly to the first trimester, and there are things like waiting periods and counseling.
This is a really important point I'd appreciate your giving serious consideration to: How would CDU members feel, today, if the German Constitutional Court suddenly decided there could be no religious education in schools, that abortion had to be legal to 24 weeks, etc? How do you think people in Germany would have reacted to those things had they happened in the 1950s-1970s, like happened here?
Take it a step further. The year after Obergefell legalized same-sex marriage in the US, the ECHR ruled there was no right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention on Human Rights. How do you think CDU members would have taken having the ECHR impose that on Germany? How do you think Poland or Italy would have taken that? As I recall, by the time Germany legalized same-sex marriage in 2017, 80% of Germans already supported it. How do you think Germans would have felt had the EHCR legalized same-sex marriage in Germany back in the 2000s when under 50% of people supported it? (I think Americans are probably 10 years behind Germany on that issue.)
Heck, Angela Merkel voted against same-sex marriage in Germany after Trump ran on accepting it a year earlier. In the US that vote would have caused the press to go completely apoplectic.
It's more difficult and I really, really won't go into details because there are several conflicting legislations (state vs. federal), court cases and I honestly don't understand law deeply. The salient point that the ECHR ruling overrode the German Constitutional Court in that regard. If its ruling would still stand, it would overrule Bavarian legislation.
>In the United States, we're not allowed to acknowledge the country's heritage as a Christian country.
Confusing, as your nation's claim seems to be "In God we trust" if I am not wrong? For a country that claims separation of church and state, that's pretty Christian, in fact I wonder what US atheists have to say about that.
I'd like to point out the following: Germany has - contrary to how US Americans both from the left and right use it as a space for projection - traditionally been a socially conservative country, one of the more conservative ones in Western Europe, and I am not even talking about the time before 1945. That's why the incomplete separation of church and state in Bavaria, the call for traditional German values as the cultural mold by politicians from Merkel's party or the abortion laws are totally not surprising.
You might also be unaware of that, but civil liberties have to a great extend been forced down the throats of German politicians and conservative voters alike by the German Constitutional Court. E.g.
- gay marriage,
- equal rights for non-married couples and for kids conceived out of wedlock,
- (some) equal rights for women,
- freedom of speech,
- freedom of the press,
- the high rank of privacy laws
- restriction on out of area operations for Bundeswehr (requires Bundestag vote)
- disallowing the cross in schools (as mentioned, overturned by the ECHR)
- giving up the Mark for the Euro
- enshrining a lower bound for welfare payments that is binding to all of Germany. This is no longer a privilege but a right on the level of constitutional rights.
Likewise, the liberals had to swallow some unpopular rulings, e.g. the one forbidding abortion but decriminalizing it in the first 12w, essentially something conservatives won (the contested law allowed up to 24w). I can't believe that the US Supreme Court has not sided with conservatives at times.
The difference in Germany is that the political role of the Constitutional Court is widely accepted and politicians handle the issue responsibly. Bashing of the court system because of decisions that go against own beliefs is rare and frowned upon. The only party that questions that consensus is the extreme right (historically also the Marxists but those don't play a role anymore, and the rest of the far left has made peace with the court). But then, we are in the sunset phase of the Merkel years, so maybe the CDU will do a GOP and let themselves held captive by the alt-right.
But the conservative brand we got over here is able to see the value of compromises and after some time is able to move on, whereas in the USA it seems to me that moderate conservatives have died out and been replaced by what we consider extremists. And yet, they find voters because there is no moderate alternative.
Which ECHR ruling are you referring to? My understanding of the ECHR precedent on this is that displaying a cross in schools is permissible under the 2011 Lautsi decision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautsi_v._Italy
> It granted that, "by prescribing the presence of crucifixes in State-schools classrooms – a sign which, whether or not it is accorded in addition a secular symbolic value, undoubtedly refers to Christianity – the regulations confer on the country's majority religion preponderant visibility in the school environment." But it declared: "That is not in itself sufficient, however, to denote a process of indoctrination on the respondent State's part and establish a breach of the requirements of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1". It added that "a crucifix on a wall is an essentially passive symbol and ... cannot be deemed to have an influence on pupils comparable to that of didactic speech or participation in religious activities".
> Confusing, as your nation's claim seems to be "In God we trust" if I am not wrong? For a country that claims separation of church and state, that's pretty Christian, in fact I wonder what US atheists have to say about that.
I'm pretty sure American Christians would happily take "in God we trust" off the currency in return for religious education in public schools, as is the case in the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.
> I'd like to point out the following: Germany has - contrary to how US Americans both from the left and right use it as a space for projection - traditionally been a socially conservative country, one of the more conservative ones in Western Europe
I'm aware of that. My wife lived in Germany for a while. That's why I'm using Germany as an example, to illustrate how another socially conservative democracy works. The United States is even more conservative, more comparable to Poland or Turkey than Germany.
> - gay marriage
The German Constitutional Court decision on same-sex marriage, like the abortion decision, was precisely the opposite of what happened in the U.S. In the case of same-sex marriage, the Bundestag legalized it (over Merkel's objection). The Constitutional Court then held that the Constitution allowed for legalization of same-sex marriage. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/new-german-gay-partnership-l.... In the U.S., it was the opposite. The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution required legalization of same-sex marriage.
> - disallowing the cross in schools (as mentioned, overturned by the ECHR)
The mildness of the German Constitutional Court decision illustrates what I'm talking about. Germany required schools to remove the cross if someone complained. In the United States, the Supreme Court eliminated religion from schools completely, in a blanket fashion. (And it happened 70 years ago!) American public schools can't even offer religious instruction, while German schools are required to offer it (unless the parent opts out).
- giving up the Mark for the Euro
Again, this was a scenario where the German Constitutional Court deferred to the legislature.
> I can't believe that the US Supreme Court has not sided with conservatives at times.
On social issues, it consistently sides with liberals. This is due to the dynamics of the legal profession, where the conservatives tend to be what people call "coastal elites." They are economically conservative, but often relatively liberal socially. For example, while abortion remains technically illegal in Germany, I count only 3 votes to overturn Roe v. Wade (which would not make abortion illegal, but simply allow Americans to adopt an abortion law like Germany or France).
> The difference in Germany is that the political role of the Constitutional Court is widely accepted and politicians handle the issue responsibly. Bashing of the court system because of decisions that go against own beliefs is rare and frowned upon.
How much of that comes from the fact that the German Constitutional Court tends to be deferential to the society's conservatism?
Or, atleast, that it have been obvious that they will soon be...
I wonder how many Americans know that Europe trades more with China than the US. Or that Japan also trades more with China than the US. Same with Africa.
The US is retreating into protectionism, internal struggle, and the opiate of social media.
It’s not that China didn’t play dirty. It’s just that the US is losing.
Having the most expensive military force isn’t nearly as useful if other sides possess nuclear weapons like you. Then it becomes a struggle along other dimensions.
The US seems full of entrenched institutions there just to increase their own power. Yet it is these institutions that are causing the greatest issues.
You have medical costs spiraling out of control. You have educational costs spiraling out of control. You have infrastructure costs spiraling out of control.
Changes in the political order have changed none of this. I don’t see the latest change addressing these either.
You can see this in the actions of the current alpha and the previous alpha. Neither addressed or is addressing how the above consume the largest and ever increasing percentages of GDP without producing corresponding gains.
Are Americans living longer and healthier lives? No, they are living shorter and less healthy lives.
Can a high percentage of the population make good incomes with their expensive educations? No, many are relegated to low wage, dead end service and gig jobs.
Why do we have to deal with inadequate and overpriced transportation, water, and energy infrastructure? How many consecutive years of forest fires does California have to live with?
The new administration just patches things without taking on the institutions themselves.
$15 minimum wage and making college free doesn’t make college more useful. It just provides an endless trough for bad education to feed.
More medicine for all doesn’t address the problem that it is way too expensive. It just feeds more money into a money eating pit.
More purchasing of clean energy infrastructure but enforcing domestic production doesn’t address the problem that your companies produce uncompetitive products. Will buying Ford electric trucks at higher prices than you could get elsewhere help anyone but Ford?
It sort of made sense then to focus so heavily on growth, they had an entire planet (not really, but a large portion) that would buy their stuff. Worring about income distribution seemed a bit unnessecary when there was so much growth that "everyone" gets a piece of the cake.
This really isn't the case anymore, but a large part (maybe even a majority) of americans still seem to think that growth is the most important factor when designing their economic system.
The new administration doesn't have a mandate to change this, Biden didn't win because he promised reform, he won because he promised to stop trump from dismantling american democracy. And he won with a really small margin.
While I generally argue that the american institutions are dysfunctional, I really wouldn't blame the current administration for not addressing the issue, not only do they not have the mandate, but their stated political ideology is "liberalism", not social democracy, so why would they want to?
That said I am starting to feel that we could need something like unions, only they should avoid messing with international affairs, avoid supporting any political parties and stick to working for their members directly.
Unions represent their workers and by extension must advocate politically for workers' rights.
How can a union fight for workers' rights if they're barred from political activity?
If companies can engage in political activity, it follows that workers' unions are just as entitled.
You are replying to something I didn't write.
I want them barred from supporting specific parties, not from influencing laws, negotiating, organizing, providing legal support etc.
Around here unions largely align with what is probably Labour elsewhere, which makes sense. But I personally feel I cannot in good conscience be found supporting someone who directly time and time again organizes boycotts against middle Easts only somehow working democracy.
I cannot live with supporting companies that are openly hostile to values I find important.
So I end up outside the unions, at least until someone creates one that promises to not do that.
> If companies can engage in political activity, it follows that workers' unions are just as entitled.
Yep. And that's ok. But I won't support them as long as they try to meddle in international affairs or even push national lawmaking in directions I think are abhorrent.
[1] https://www.betterteam.com/illegal-interview-questions
I recall a case around 8-10 years ago when an employer or university admissions dept forcefully asked someone for their Facebook username and password - she declined but offered to login on a computer in the office for them to see - which they agreed to, and her profile had details the interviewers were not legally entitled to receive, and she sued and she won... - or something. Does anyone else remember?
...otherwise we wouldn't have law bloggers writing articles like this: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-ask-pa...
I request social media links (not passwords, just profile links) from everyone I'm considering hiring, because any/all information I can use to winnow potentially problem hires out before I make an offer is extremely valuable to me.
You can tell a lot about a person from their social media profiles and posts.
I think that's insane and abusive.
Asking to see someone's public webpage isn't.
The exterior of someone's house isn't useful in hiring. Their thoughts and opinions they choose to publish to the billions on the internet generally are.
Edit: and I kind of agree with the others.
I don't have a Facebook account, nor Instagram, but would my Fetlife profile be okay?
* If not, why is Fetlife exempt from your idea of what a social-network is?
* If so, what business does my employer have at all seeing my Fetlife account?
* If you decide not to hire me entirely on the basis that I have a Fetlife account then you're opening yourself up to an unlawful discrimination lawsuit.
Also, the last point is incorrect: being kinky is not a protected class, and one does not even need to be kinky to be on Fetlife. Not hiring someone because they are on Fetlife isn't protected class discrimination even if their Fetlife profile happened to disclose they are in a protected class. It's a social network like any other.
Interviewing someone opens oneself up to a potential lawsuit, period. Asking for information about a candidate that has nothing to do with membership in a protected class (such as "show me your public websites", which is what such a request amounts to) is no more risk than asking in what city someone went to university (the city for which, for example, could suggest they attended an HBCU). The whole process is fraught with risk; we should not allow that to prevent us from learning a detailed picture about a candidate's lifestyle and character (assiduously avoiding specifically seeking out information associated with protected class membership).
It's already common to ask for a LinkedIn or GitHub profile for hiring certain types of roles. There's no difference asking for Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.
Would you hire a photographer without seeing their Instagram?
It's also entirely legal to discriminate against someone for the specific set of social media services they do or do not have an account on, as long as they aren't serving as a proxy for protected class discrimination (eg ChristianMingle).
All of hiring is a process of discrimination: against the less skilled, less diligent, less suited to a particular job role. More information helps in that process. One has to always be careful to avoid discriminating against protected classes, but most attributes of most people, even outside of the professional sphere, are not protected and are legal and prudent grounds for hiring discrimination.
LinkedIn is a professional networking - and resume/CV hosting site. Facebook and Instgram are for friends, family, hobbies, and the like. They're worlds apart and it's intellectually dishonest of you to equate them.
> Would you hire a photographer without seeing their Instagram?
No, I wouldn't. Instagram isn't Flickr, deviantArt, nor their professional portfolio.
Absolutely not; public webpages are public webpages. What someone chooses to publish, and where, is an important measure of their personality and attitude.
- I see your point is based on the notion that "if it's public in one space, you intend for it to be public in all spaces in your life" - but that's an incorrect assumption: Fetlife profiles aren't "public" (insofar as Google can't see them), and I don't have my real-life name on it, and I certainly don't intend to share it with anyone whom I want to maintain a strict separation from my private life.
Am I not entitled to a private life? What right do you have to enter my private life?
Can I see your Fetlife account? Can I see inside your house from the street-level windows? Can I bring a ladder to the side of your house and peer into your upstairs bedroom? Where's the limit for you?
I am talking about public webpages.
As for my Fetlife account, my username is the same there as it is here, and on IRC, and on Wikipedia, and on GitHub, et c.
I have blackout treatments on my windows.
The aptitude for being aware of what is or isn't public/published is something I hire for, too. Then again, I work with data and customers that live and die by such things.
So it's no longer enough to just keep your "wrong" opinions to yourself, you have to actually prove that you have the "right" opinions. Enjoy having the right opinions at the moment, I guess - until fashions change, anyway.
I feel exactly the same way, although initially, this wasn't a conscious decision. I just did not understand the hype and ignored it. For me, as a 90ies kid, social media was IRC, messengers, and email. It still is. When I first read about Twitter, I thought that technologically, it was only one step away from a Hello World web application.
This honestly reads like satire. Why were they "distressed" by this and who could possibly be affected or offended by something so trivial?
Depending on the demographics of the authors they represent, it may well be a significant negative for their business to be associated with those platforms.
Companies in the states appear to wear their political allegiances as a badge of honour eliciting an us-or-them reaction. Left and Right ideologies often have wants which flip from side to side, generation to generation.
It's worrying and baffling that someone's source of income can be severed when there has been no evidence of misconduct.
Isn't this a feature of at will employment?. I know there are some protected attributes, but I was under the impression you could be fired for pretty much anything outside of those protected attributes.
You have zero idea what evidence there is and isn't. The evidence has not been revealed by those involved, and it certainly hasn't been published in this short article you just read.
You just assumed that "she used two sites" was the absolute entirety of the story.
If there was further evidence she did not feel the need to disclose further. However it does appear that mentioning the association was enough justification.
Also the complaints that were aired didn't provide any further evidence other than the fact that she was on the platform. Again only providing the association as the source of the concern.
How do we get from that to a very public firing over a space of a few hours? More evidence may come to light but there are several things very problematic about this.
What exactly were they "used" for?
Indeed workers rights in the US are among the weakest in the developed world. As shocked as I was at the weak protections in the UK when I moved here, even the UK is magnitudes better in this respect.
Yet this kind of worker hostile environment is what US voters keeps voting for.
How did these people get so radicalized such that speech they don't like is "extremist"?
The same kind of people were saying its fine if you get deplatformed from Twitter, but now want to ostracize you for using the alternatives.
My surprise lessened after I Googled the name of the agency. It seems like De Chiara has been flippant with her business partners in the past:
Goodman: [...] If you could represent our interests “enthusiastically,” per our deal – and honestly – that would be appreciated. We’ve all worked too hard to see this fall apart now. Dean Goodman.
De Chiara: [...] I don’t appreciate your attitude. I don’t deserve it... Just read your email again–now you’re calling me dishonest? Go to hell.
Also the whole cancel culture is crazy since it’s so trigger happy. In many ways it feels like a witch hunt. Someone says something, the crowd follows (without much evidence) and makes a ton of noise on social media. The companies see a hit on their brand and do whatever the mob is asking and pretend to be the good guys/girls.
We really do need a society that encourages fact checking and hearing both sides of the story. Amplifying filter bubbles doesn’t end well for our society.
I have given this a great deal of thought and I'm still torn on what to believe. On one hand, everyone wants to be judge, jury, and executioner. This means that the power the state has to determine these things is eroded. Probably as a result of the general loss of trust in institutions.
On the other hand, the United States specifically has a long history of what is considered community justice. Often this happens when the institutions to provide it do not exist yet or fail in their goals.
Similar to losing any kind of arbiter of truth, we are also losing truth in justice. Truth takes time, the mob is fickle, and the pitchforks are heavy.
Now that just any old pleb can express an opinion on the actions and comments of their betters it seems that collective expressions of disapproval with the intent of exerting power is a bad thing!
"Cancelling" is a boycott in the marketplace of ideas. The left and the right should find something to appeal to them there!
There seems to me, looking at all of this US hyperpartisan nonsense as an outsider, to be quite a bit of difference between the frothy Gab/Parler/etc contingent and an average median republican (who I don't really imagine spends a ton of time on niche social media).
In California, it actually is.
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/07/26/laws-protecting-private...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
> California Labor Code section 1101 prohibits employers from implementing any rule, regulation, or policy "forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office" or "controlling or directing or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees."
>
> California Labor Code section 1102 provides "[n]o employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." To this end, employers cannot enact policies limiting employees' political activities or affiliations or in essence force employees to follow the employer's political leanings.
If you were a rabid QAnon nut, why should I hire you? Saying republican is this context is just driving the wedge in too far.
Based on what I've seen and people I know who were active on Gab and Parler I would venture to say it's not nearly as high as people think. The amount of people with truly fringe beliefs is pretty small, even when concentrated.
And I'd personally much rather have this small group of people outletting their anger onto the internet instead of IRL.
Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
IRL they're limited physically to whoever they can reach; online they can make their hate travel the world ( point in case, there were QAnon related actions in Germany! If the Q people had been purely IRL that would have never happened)
Also, receiving thousands of threats and being doxed "onto the internet" has very serious consequences IRL.
Venting anger on the internet and it producing no real change isn’t an “outlet”, its just a pressure cooker.
> Pushing them further and further into a corner with ever expanding censorship and expecting them to become good tolerant citizens has always seemed like a fools game to me.
Containing the various white supremacist / conspiracy cults isn’t about reforming them, its about reducing their ability to recruit and radicalize. While reforming those already in the cults would be nice, its mostly a lost cause. They aren’t, for the most part, going to become “good, tolerant citizens”.
Aside: Gab is horrible technically speaking; Firefox uses my full CPU :-/
I had a Parler login since July. Mostly out of curiosity and just to read/lurk. There was a very vocal loony subset, but that is the Internet for you.
Kicking people out of work for visiting a hacking forum is about same. After all, for the general public, hacking sounds like crime and sometimes actually is. People who deliberately choose to associate themselve with hackers are not to be trusted, or?
No. This attitude has to stop. Having nazis and far-right extremists being vocal on your site is not "the internet for you".
It is a deliberate choice by whoever runs the site to be a welcoming home for the vilest voices.
I believe that erasing such people from a worldwide forum veers dangerously close to covering an alarm signal on your car's dashboard with black tape because it is annoying and life feels better without worrying about what might be happening under the hood.
I prefer living my life without illusions about the rest of humanity, doubly so in politics.
This kind of hate SPREADS. Letting it be normalises it, and lets it spread. The antidote to this kind of thing is for the rest of society to loudly and clearly reject it, and make it very obvious it is not acceptable.
Letting people keep spreading their hate does the exact opposite.
"We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Exposing it does not deal with it. It just gives it more air to spread. You actually need the dealing with part.
What makes you think that?
It's literally in the quote.
Covering up hatred is not dealing with it, it's a facile attempt at ignoring it.
It is nowhere to be seen in today's world, though. You're here talking about letting the nazis spread their hatred as much as they want, but I am not seeing you having any plan for how to dealing with them, other than just letting them do whatever they want.
Once you let them out, what are you planning to do to deal with them?
Hatred is very difficult to confront effectively. It requires inner strength and a great capacity for love. So many people lack that and just default to mirroring that hatred back at the hater, or just try to cover it up and ignore it.
It's hard to see things when you don't want to see them.
>Once you let them out, what are you planning to do to deal with them?
If you want a "plan" then simply study the philosophy and history of Dr. King.
Here's a great place to start:
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/lov...
You have no standing to deny me that.
Especially since you have pledged your allegiance to the plans of Big Tech overlords like Mark Zuckerberg who profit greatly from the engagement metrics of hate.
Yeah, no. I am actually amazed the platform lived as long as it did because there was no opposition to members voicing death threats against politicians/activists/what have you. No moderation to keep those in check.
Outside some Neonazi sites, I've never seen anything like it, some Islamist sites probably are similar.
Parler also had multiple communities depending on language. The Czech community of early 2021 was nowhere as wild as the American one at the same time. We are not close to any election now, though; this might have had a cooling effct.
I wouldn't surprised if I get downvoted for this, but I intend to ask anyone I interview in the future (not currently in a role that involves hiring) if they voted for Trump in 2020. And a yes will be a disqualifying answer on the basis of poor judgement. (It's also a question I will be asking any potential employer I interview with, going forward, for the same reason.)
Yes, I will lose some diversity of thought as a result. Yes it means I can't hire employees in California. Yes, there will be potential bad PR. No, I won't feel guilty about it at all. And yes, I will also run it by appropriate lawyers before actually implementing it.
It wasn’t clear in my comment, but I’m not presenting this from a middle management perspective. I wouldn’t arbitrarily be adding new requirements to some employer’s hiring. This is me speaking about how I’ll act for any company I start next (having been a founder and CEO before).
Unless you define “tech hiring pool” as “recent college grads living in the Bay Area”. But even there the numbers are material.
This would be a very strange question to be asked of an interviewer.
> Yes it means I can't hire employees in California
Per the article I linked to up-thread, it's not just CA:
California, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Madison.
Maybe you don't care about some of those locations, but CA, CO, and Seattle seem like pretty important ones in the tech world.
You’re correct that it rules out some important locations in tech, and I do think geography will continue to matter to a degree.
I think there’s also some appeal to a company that has strong, publicly stated principles that can benefit recruiting, but it remains to be seen. But when I consider potential future ventures, these are things I’ve considered and intend to apply.
But you may find that many executives — including those who did not vote for Trump — are not interested in hiring people who believe they are entitled to know how their colleagues/bosses voted.
Also, how do you plan on phrasing the question? And if you're not fully within the power to "disqualify" the candidate, what other steps are you planning on taking to prevent them from being hired by your employer? Have you discussed it yet with your employer's HR department yet?
I did a poor job in my first comment of explaining my role relative to hiring. I'm speaking from a position of having been a founder and CEO, and likely being one again. The question about how this would play it with HR is understood, but isn't applicable to me personally. I believe (as I suspect you do) that in most organizations, this would be a hard thing to instill retroactively or individually and would meet lots of resistance, unless it were a very philosophically aligned company.
“the specific political distinction … is that between friend and enemy.”
"Hans, are we the baddies?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvpvlT9pJU
Is being active on Gab and Parler a Christian religious activity?
Being "a Christian" (whatever that means...) is a protected class - but where in the Bible did Moses or Jesus command people to use Gab, Parler - or even be "conservative"?
You can be fired for being a selfish ass (I'm referring to the donkey hybrid, as befits the biblical narrative) - and that's my interpretation of what happened. What matters now is if the law will allow her to use her religion as the basis for being an ass - or not.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Specifically: “ Even if you work in a state that doesn’t protect employees from political discrimination, you might still have a legal claim if your employer’s actions were really based on a protected trait under Title VII or a similar state law. For example, if African American employees are fired for participating in a Black Lives Matter rally, but employees of other races are not fired for going to marches, rallies, or protests, that might qualify as illegal race discrimination. ”
You don’t have enough information to say either way, and the law and courts aren’t as cut-and-dry as you want to believe.
Even the social media choices may be subject, because it may depend largely on how the employer perceived it at the time.
But now liberals here are saying that refusing to hire or firing people from a predominantly Republican and/or Christian social network is different.
It's the same. That position is hypocritical regardless of whether you think it should be legal.
Correct.
However, given the wider social context I’m making an inference from the facts that are established.
It is in California (and various other states).
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/07/26/laws-protecting-private...
And that's exactly whats happening now.
I'm not saying that there aren't people that had it coming, but it's never a good idea to switch your brain off and run with the crowd.
Of course they can.
They simply ban/allow people until they get the mix of people they want. It happens all the time on Reddit e.g. /r/the_donald, /r/conspiracy.
Like r/the_donald. Mods can effectively whitelist a set of users by banning everyone else.
So I'd say in this case, the social networks most definitely chose their users.
From SlateStarCodex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
If you post something for the world to see, assume that the wrong person will see it at the worst possible time, even if it's years in the future. If you aren't comfortable with that, take your posts private or suspend your account, or delete your old posts, ASAP. At one point I literally walked through years of reddit history to delete any posts that might be embarrassing, even though I post pseudonymously
"In a November 12 tweet, Oefelein invited followers to join her on the conservative social network, which she described as "a great platform with no censorship." Oefelein suggested earlier this month that she may also use the far-right social networking site Gab."
The fired agent also said:
"Well thanks Twitter and @JDLitAgency," Oefelein wrote. "I just got fired because I'm a Christian and a conservative."
Which makes me suspect that she was writing political stuff with her real name on Parler/Gab, since Parler/Gab are not inherently Christian sites. (and theoretically aren't inherently conservative ones either?)
However there's quite possibly a lot more to it than that.
Christianity is not inherently evil but (like all major religious texts) the Bible uh... lends itself to multiple interpretations, to put it mildly.
Surely we can agree that a lot of heinous behavior over the years has been justified by the perpetrators in the name of religion. I'm sure those folks felt they were presecuted "just for following their religion" as well.
Of course, the most politically-conservative Christians I know are not on Parler nor Gab, but they're also not Trump supporters, which seemed to be the real reason people went to Parler/Gab. That's an unsupported assertion on my part, but seems consistent with my observations.
She wasn't fired because she's a Christian and a conservative. She was fired because she was active on two sites tied to attempted insurrection. It's a bad look for the agency, but IMO a worse look for Oefelein.
0. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...
The Naval War College professor being interviewed in the article basically argues that unless the military is involved, it isn't a "coup", by definition. That would make the phrase "military coup" redundant, and contradicts the Merriam-Webster definition[1] which characterizes it as:
> a “sudden decisive exercise of force in politics,” but particularly the “violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”
By the professor's logic, even if a president were to explicitly command his followers to storm the Capitol, eliminate his political opponents, and destroy the certifications of the electoral votes he had lost, allowing him to stay in power illegitimately, that still wouldn't be a coup (or a self-coup, presumably).
In any case, another article[2] on the same site makes the opposing case:
> It’s undeniable at this point. The United States is witnessing a coup attempt — a forceful effort to seize power against the legal framework.
Admittedly it was published even earlier than the other article, but it had been drafted in response to discussions which had begun before the protests had turned violent, vindicating the author's position.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/13/insurrection-coup-and...
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/coup-america-capitol-el...
It's neither hyperbole nor a lie.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/coup-america-capitol-el...
Meanwhile: There's presumably a lot of very free* speech in the Parler data dump, connected to people's verified accounts, which could easily be finding its way to employers, who in turn get to decide how they want to handle it.
* racist, treasonous, violent, etc.
Speech is speech. Think about the limits you want carefully. Especially if it starts with the thought that a particular ideological or ethnic group excercising speech should result in them "getting whats coming to them"
In this case, as the statement made clear - it's not speech that is the problem, it was that she choose to speak at all, that was the problem.
Guilty until proven innocent.
This whole discussion is a great encapsulation of mindless, reflexive outrage on hacker news.
I signed up for a Parler account when it first opened, just for a bit of curiosity and research. Found it to be a total cesspool, never posted anything.
People should be judged for the actual opinions they express, when taken in the context of the totality of their character. But I definitely wouldn't support the shunning of somebody simply for signing up for a free service.
Heck, as a software developer and one who dabbles in activism, I've signed up for way "worse" sites than Parler. Waaaaaaay worse.
A big complaint of young people was that there wasn't any real difference between the two major US parties. Well, that's over.
I am not from US, but from what I saw generally both parties act the same, the exceptions are basically a few personalities that warp the VOTERs around them, but not the people in power.
Trump for the GOP (that seemly only joined the GOP because he could win their primaries... if you take a look on his pre-GOP relationships he had strong ties to democratic party) and Sanders for Democrats (and he is not even officially in the party if I remember correctly, he in the Senate was listed as "independent that sits with Democrats")
Even AOC that famously claim to be socialist got nicknamed in some circles as "Fraud Squad" because despite claiming to be socialist she is voting along status-quo US politics (that is: generally pro-corporations).
Voters believe the parties are different now, but the people elected aren't that different, it is why in USA accusing someone of doing "partisan blocking" makes sense, it is because often when a party is blocking the other, they are doing so for shenanigans, not because they truly believe the proposal is bad, often both parties believe in the proposal but want to play political games.
Being against cancel culture but from the right is "The problems (getting cancelled out of a job) are bad... but the causes (at-will employment), the causes are good."
Here in Czechia, emplyees generally cannot be fired for issues unrelated to work, and even most work excesses must be first handled by written admonishment before firing.
Enough of the authoritarianism.
Everyone should be "good" with my exact definition of good, in thinking, feeling, actions and reactions to things.
Btw Conservatives promote less government not zero government interference. I think you’re confusing it with hardcore libertarianism.
Domestic terrorism.
Communists and Fascists share a lot of the same authoritarian tactics.
I’ve heard it said that the enemy of extremists isn't the extremist on the other side, it’s the moderates. Extremists are itching for a fight, and they’ll continue fighting forever. Moderates and pragmatists stand in the way of that goal. If an extremist group were to win and completely eliminate the other side, they’d draw some other battle lines within their own group. “Othering” is important to extremists, and the’ll find a way to do it.
I’m another proud lefty. I marched with Black Lives Matter last summer, voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries, I’m vegan for all the reasons people think are stupid. All of that is true, and it infuriates me to see leftist extremists getting dressed up in black and setting buildings on fire. It infuriates me to see leftists gatekeeping on Twitter, and taking such joy from tweeting people’s employers to try to get them fired for the crime of making a joke that didn’t pass a purity test, or for having a counterintuitive take on something complex. Internet pile ons are the worst.
All that said, it confounds me that people on the right seem to be unable to see these traits within their own party, and aren’t working harder to rid their ranks of QAnon, Proud Boys, and Trumpism. It seems like anyone on the right who has the temerity to point out these problems gets branded as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and expelled from the party. Jeff Sessions – JEFF SESSIONS – was cancelled by the right for not being right enough.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of projection going on all around.
Militant left is as dangerous as militant right. The problem is not the side of the political spectrum but the approach to dealing with opponents.
Yeah... The terrible dangers of universal healthcare and proportional taxes...
It get dangerous when either side decides that anything standing in the way (in their opinion) of these ideals are "other", and that the "others" are so evil they are simply inhuman, and must be quashed by all means necessary.
This pattern repeats in history many, many times. And lots of people are nervous that the beginning of that pattern is starting to play out in the modern West.
True. Remember all the lynchings of white people in the South by the BBB, for offenses sometimes as minor as drinking from the wrong water fountain?
Or when BLM marched, with torches in hand, chanting "Blood and soil" and "You will not replace us"? There was even a Neonazi woman who was ran over by a BLM activist driving a car.
And what about the day when BLM terrorists invaded the Capitol threatening to kill everyone who wouldn't break the law and vote Obama back into the presidency? That day was wild.
If you're skeptical that leftism can cause violence, the wikipedia list of recent far-left terrorism groups may convince you otherwise: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism
And of course, there's the more classical examples: Maoist struggle sessions, the Red Terror, the Cambodian Killing Fields.
Extremism is dangerous. And it's concerning to me that this has become a debatable point.
I am all for fighting far-right extremists. I am very against innocent civilians being killed, oppressed, or censored in the process.
I think however, cancel culture in particular, is a phenom of the Left right now.
Weaponizing conspiracy (QAnon, Elections, COVID) is a culture of the Right, no doubt.
Both sides are fully aware of what they are doing and leveraging it on purpose (not all, but many).
The thing is - if we have good institutions then we can hold out against QAnon. But cancel culture I think is actually a corrosion of our institutions.
QAnon and COVID conspiracies are not a problem at Harvard, whereas Cancel Culture is, in fact, it's being driven little bit from places like that.
Mention the name AOC favorably, and you will be shut down. Parler censored people for supporting BLM. Many took pride in tanking Captain Marvel because of its lead's support for feminist causes. Any progressive action you take will cause you to be dubbed "virtue signalling".
It's all just cancel culture. They simply won't call it that.
There's a saying that for the right wing, every accusation is a confession. They're calling it out on the left (much of it nut-picking[1]) because it's a pervasive part of their own culture.
No, this is not remotely true. They'll downvote you into obvlivion on 'Fox News' comments - but this is not cancel culture.
Nobody is 'losing their job' and being 'publicly shamed' because they said the 'like AOC'.
Sure - you might get a few Trumpers in your face for supporting one of the more perceptibly radical faces of the Demcorcatic party - but that's just 'angry culture' - not cancel culture.
" Parler censored people for supporting BLM."
I strongly doubt this is true - even if it is - again, this is not 'cancel culture' - this is just bad groupthink on a site.
If executives and staff were being fired and losing their jobs for showing up at a BLM rally, or donating money to BLM - that would be 'cancel culture' - but I don't believe that is happening.
Also the person you are replying to didn't say they destroy peoples lives based on racial hatred. They haven't destroyed anyone's lives because they're white.
I get that there is a distinct cultural bias against Black people (what people call "anti-Blackness"). Living in the south this was quite apparent to me. This is structural in nature, and quite distinct from normal majority/minority dynamics.
But I don't perceive any similar "white privilege." To go to your resume example, I've got a last name that's definitely Muslim, but I've never perceived any sort of difference in response on that basis. (And in myriad areas, from income policing to health, statistically I'm likely to enjoy advantages compared to white people.) I think the concept of "white privilege" is actually a conceptual error that comes from generalizing Black-white racial dynamics to a multi-ethnic society.
Also, to address your point about the KKK member, the left uses "racism" to mean a lot more than just that. Based on that expansive definition of "racism" I'd qualify use of phrases like "unbearable whiteness" as "racism": https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/the-unbearable-white...
About 30 years ago (wow!), in my late teens I organized a party on a house my aunt recently bought to become her medical practice. We had lots of drinks, some drugs, a DJ, live music and some guests walking over the roof of neighboring houses. Police got called.
When they saw me, young and privileged, they wanted to arrest me. I offered them a beer, they entered the house, one of them played the drum set with his service gun. They drank some fancy cocktails.
They enjoyed themselves for about 15 minutes until they were called on the radio. Then they told me, laughing, I should try to control my guests a little better. Then they went away.
If we weren't a bunch or privileged white kids in an upper middle class neighborhood, they'd most likely arrive shooting, as they do when there are parties in slums.
Can you please link to the news articles about these slum parties that are broken up by officers who start shooting the moment they arrive? Seems like something that would definitely get reported on.
In all my time living in low-income housing, I never witnessed something like this. And I had plenty of sleepless nights when neighbors would throw ragers. Some got broken up (mostly when a fight would break out among attendees), and I'm sure some of the cops weren't pleasant. But I never witnessed cops jumping out of their cars with their guns blazing.
Although I'm one piece of anecdotal evidence, so I'd like to see the evidence you have of this event.
https://recordtv.r7.com/fala-brasil/videos/mpsp-ira-indiciar...
Most often nothing happens.
My comment, and my personal experiences, relate to America. At least here, I don't know of any events where police have opened fire on a pack of teenagers partying without reason. But they could exist, which was why I was asking for evidence.
Statistically, and adjusted for age (which is really important because there is quite a big difference in median age between racial groups in the U.S.) asians are actually less likely to get shot by the police than whites. Latinos are about the same/a little bit more likely. Black people are twice as likely to get shot by the police.
The rule of thumb is that they will be more violent with poorer people, which has a high correlation with having darker skin, at least in southern Brazil. Asians are more often than not, middle and upper-class.
And yes I chose the kkk member as an obviously racist person but my point was that pointing out white privilege is just not racist.
Please don't use HN for ideological battle or post generic ideological comments or flamewar comments to HN. All that leads to internet hell, which we're trying to avoid here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We ban accounts that do those things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
especially if they're using HN primarily for those things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Looking at your recent commenting history, it looks like you either are, or are perilously close to the line. Please stop.
We now live in the future, where everybody is either a Communist or a Fascist.
You cannot delete past HN comments.
When one group does something unassailable bad - like raid capitol hill - it embolden radicals from other groups, just raising the bar below which acceptable actions happen.
We're going to see a lot more arbitrary banning among people who might have done 'very bad things' and maybe deserved some kind of censure.
That said, I don't agree with this firing. "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - Mencken