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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

So people must live in fear of clicking on links that contain a few nipples?

[Edit: Presumably just female nipples?]

Yes, American employers are pretty terribly paranoid when it comes to nipples. What it boils down to is they adopt a strong policy as a defense against lawsuits, so if they are ever dragged into court by an employee claiming a 'hostile work environment', they can point to their policy enforcement as proof that they aren't a 'hostile environment'. In practice the policies don't just ban porn, they ban anything that could possibly make anybody feel uncomfortable or objectified, so swimsuit calendars or even dirty jokes can get you fired.

So the upshot is, if a site isn't careful about identifying links to naked photos, it is no longer safe to read it at work. Even some sites that sometimes have racy ads are best avoided at big companies (who tend to have bigger legal departments, lawsuit exposure, and stricter policies).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_environment_sexual_hara...

Ouch. Sometimes, the US sounds like how DDR would have been if it had been run by conservative christians.

Sigh. It's feminists he's talking about. People hate conservatives and Christians with an irrationality I just can't understand.

They meddle. The only reason I ever know what somebody is is because they told me (annoyed me), or otherwise made their issue my own.

I don't hate buddhists. Do you know why? Because they don't go out of their way to bug me regularly.

Regarding Christians anyway, you might be interested in John 15:18-19, and the following verses, assuming you're not aware of them. We expect a certain amount of irrational hate.

No criticism intended.

What strikes me as odd about that is this:

- Free Speech is (over?)valued, things that are forbidden as insulting/hate-speech etc. over in DE are 'okay' and free to express in the US. Something the people I talked to were proud of and regularly pointed to as the fundamental freedom.

vs.

- Careful what you say, it might get you fired. We had the swear words discussion lately, now we're talking nipples / nudity and references to those.

I understand that these issues are not the same. It just feels like the Freedom of Speech is reduced(?) w/o actually touching the constitution, is it really still that free?

To answer your last point, the constitution only protects from government restrictions on free speech, it says nothing about what private parties may require from their employees at work.

Yes, alas.

Startup opportunity?

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