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Comment by honeybadger1 | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that people are 'for' employers controlling every aspect of their lives.

> employers controlling every aspect of their lives

Agreed. The worst one – "they cut off my health insurance same day" – is pretty unique to the USA in particular. I wonder what it would take for the citizens of USA to get rid of the concept of employer-based health insurance, and replacing it with socialised healthcare.

Half the country's been trying for decades, the other half's more interested in culture wars.

>the other half's more interested in culture wars.

Are they? Looking at the polls[1], it's not really clear either way. For instance much more republicans think that "the state of moral values" is a "big problem", which seems to suggest they're "more interested in culture wars", but at the same time for "racism" the numbers are flipped.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-he...

Creating an equivalence between “moral values” and racism is the goal of “culture war” framing. Interesting to see it working, I suppose

Do you have a justification for that claim that isn't along the lines of "our cause is just and is worth fighting for/debating. Their cause is unjust and is just 'culture war' issues meant to distract"?

i suppose the point being made here is that we are currently in a place of racism, and anyone advocating that moving waway from that place is bad, happens to be advocating for racsim indirectly. i get that that is not the intent of the person, but it is the end they found.

>i suppose the point being made here is that we are currently in a place of racism, and anyone advocating that moving waway from that place is bad, happens to be advocating for racsim indirectly.

It's trivial to reword this for "the state of moral values", eg. "we are currently in a place of degrading moral values, and anyone advocating that moving away from that place is bad, happens to be advocating for degrading moral values indirectly". In other words, both "racism" and "the state of moral values" are culture war topics, and I don't how you can justify privileging one without having to invoke your own political beliefs.

The first half being the poor and disenfranchised, and the second half being the rich and powerful. And they're not really interested in the culture wars per se, they're just a convenient tool for preventing the lower classes from finding common cause.

Eliminating employer-based health insurance doesn't require socialized healthcare. Another approach would be to require everyone to purchase private insurance on a retail basis, with subsidies for low-income people.

My impression is that the problem with health insurance is that it incentivises hospitals to mark up all of their invoice items by factors of tens. And that behind closed doors the insurance companies negotiate lower actual prices for themselves, so that they don't ever even really pay that much to the hospitals. Which, on its own is not a problem. But the problem is that the end result of this is that anyone who is without health insurance is completely screwed the moment they get a severe health problem. And I don't see any reason why anyone should end up economically f*cked for life just because they didn't have health insurance in any one particular moment of their life where something bad happened to them.

But as a first approximation, it would still certainly be an improvement to untangle the employers from the health insurance. And have people buy health insurance privately for a couple of decades and then with the experience of that in hand improve things further. Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good an all that.

I don't know that splitting existing private insurance from employment would be much better

Given how expensive it is, even if wages went up to compensate, you're still directly tied to continued employment to afford paying for it on your own. Subsidies would take a while to kick in and be a bureaucratic nightmare

It would just quite simply be infinitely better if you didn't have to deal with insurance at all and you could just go to the doctor. No need for two decades of a slightly different kind of hell to try to convince us

I hope this person’s next step is to organize and unionize his workplace, in order to further defang their employer’s attempts of control outside the workplace. If they attempt to fire him for that, the NLRB can step in and WHYY can be 2/2 for taking the L.

Organizing is the only protection a worker has against unilateral actions by an employer.

His workplace is already unionized, he credits SAG for their representation in the arbitration s as being the reasons for this victory.

Tremendous, thanks for sharing this fact.

Give me a break.

This guy is a reporter, so his public persona is an integral part of his job. And not "every aspect", only aspects in which he's performing in public.

His opinions as a private citizen do not in any way reflect on the quality or content of his work as a reporter, which his employer took 0 issue with prior to learning about his personal life.

There's a pretty easy correlate for this to understand why it's bad:

Let's say a company discovers that you are gay, and fires you based on some sort of "morality" clause.

Cool?

Why not? From many common perspectives globally, being gay is far more morally incorrect than making a joke about "wokeness".

Many organized religious and even non-religious worldviews have strict strictures against being a homosexual, all over the world.

Conversely, the morality that someone shouldn't say anything at any time ever that isn't completely neutral is siloed to a small band of weirdos.

A salient detail that seems to be overlooked by most in this thread is that this putative comedian was making direct and personal references to coworkers and/or authorities working for his self-same employer.

So not only was he making bigoted and tasteless jokes, but some of them were revealing private business that should've been kept as internal matters. He betrayed the trust and confidentiality of his employer and his coworkers. That in itself is reprehensible, racism or not. Certainly, any employer who takes action against that sort of betrayal can be justified.

>So not only was he making bigoted and tasteless jokes

You've played your hand.

Gotta keep that close to the vest to be properly disingeneous.

If you're the kind of person who addresses the substance in another person's objection, now is the time to do so.

But if you're the kind of person to seize upon a shiny but irrelevant detail and leave the substantive parts unaddressed, I guess your work is done.

I am not the original commenter, but I think saying the jokes are “bigoted” shows a bias, and it was good to emphasize that by not addressing the other argument. We could have a discussion about whether getting fired for talking about conduct at your employer is right, but to link it with the idea that someone told “bigoted” jokes is to conflate two things.

To say those jokes are “bigoted” has a high bar, since comedy is about entertainment and not real. The jokes in the article don’t meet that bar, but one should be circumspect about drawing that conclusion because comedy isn’t real. To throw around that judgment offhand without supporting it is to lend support to a world based on censorship and conformity. It should not just be an assumption - “yeah of course these jokes are bigoted.” - that should be the substance of the discussion before we draw that conclusion.

So it’s proper to call out the bias of the commenter and not address their other argument.

>So it’s proper to call out the bias of the commenter

I think whether or not their words amount to bias is up for debate, but I don't object to that subject being brought up in addition to the subject under discussion so far.

>and not address their other argument.

This part I don't agree with. That other argument is completely independent, and worth pursuing. Abandoning it completely is conceding defeat on that front.

Addressing a biased interlocutor acting in bad faith isn't a proper usage of finite time and attention.

Imagine a hypothetical person asked you the same question, but in good faith.

How would you respond?

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