Comment by hi-im-mi-ih | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hi-im-mi-ih | Hacker News Reader

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> What if your "controversial opinion" harasses and alienates other people?

> as a victim you ARE entitled to share your story. You are entitled to tell people "hey this person did something bad and it hurt me."

An employee at a SV company writes on a forum that he's not a fan of diversity quotas and equity. Then, someone reads it, and claims that they feel harassed and alienated by that quote. They tweet an angry message accompanied by a screenshot of the forum post. Then, a twitter mob forms, calling the employee a Nazi. He's conflated with real racism now, though he originally was talking about diversity quotas and equity. Because his language was "harmful", the victims have their justification; by any means necessary they must remove this hateful Nazi.

The employee gets fired for PR reasons. Other employees stay away from those topics, self-silencing for fear of retaliation like the 1st employee received. Ideas are stifled; democracy is weakened.

Can you see how your chain of logic leads to this?

The part that bothers and even scares me is that people (perhaps OP) do see how their chain of logic follows through your example. But they agree with and don’t find it morally wrong.

It’s like there’s this bro-Catholicism where everyone has original sin of racism or whatnot and must be punished through ex-communication. And the whole moral system is understood and agreed to.

I only hope that some sort of racism/redeemer emerges who can wash away the sins of bigotry and allow the excommunicated to no longer cause racism and be allowed to work again within society.

> An employee at a SV company writes on a forum that he's not a fan of diversity quotas and equity. Then, someone reads it, and claims that they feel harassed and alienated by that quote. They tweet an angry message accompanied by a screenshot of the forum post. Then, a twitter mob forms, calling the employee a Nazi. He's conflated with real racism now, though he originally was talking about diversity quotas and equity. Because his language was "harmful", the victims have their justification; by any means necessary they must remove this hateful Nazi.

So you're referring to the James Damore situation, and I take it that you felt his firing was unjust. Your characterization makes it clear that you don't think his writing was actively disparaging and harassing of huge swaths of people, or objectively discrimination. We're probably done discussing then if you don't see that, a lot of good treatment has been given to this subject if you look at it's not my responsibility to educate you.

His firing and silencing of sexists makes the workplace a lot safer for people who are guilty of nothing but being born women. It makes it a lot less safe for people who espouse views that hurt others. I'm 100% OK with that -- that should be how the world works.

>Ideas are stifled; democracy is weakened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

^ Actually it's the opposite of what you think.

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