This was literally a selling point at Google:
> Larry Page and Sergey Brin ... had designed their company's famously open culture to facilitate free thinking. Employees were “obligated to dissent” if they saw something they disagreed with, and they were encouraged to “bring their whole selves” to work rather than check their politics and personal lives at the door.[1]
Lots of companies have figured out that "having a worthwhile mission", in addition to just a paycheck, is one way to distinguish themselves from other potential employers.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...
Seems like James Damore took their advice.
I think that "bring your whole self" assumed that the politics everyone would talk about would be politics in the general, diffuse, societal sense. The proper scope of government, the merits of particular policies and candidates, how to solve problems X and Y.
Politics in the sense of judging on who deserves to work at Google, or who is underserving, which directly implies that certain Googlers would be unfit to be there under different regimes, isn't outward-facing. It directly hurts peers. A policy which evicts someone for introducing the notion that some Googlers are unfit to be Googlers will also selectively hurt some folks at Google for speaking their mind.
Google can't have it both ways. I think they made the better choice. I'd rather treat my coworkers compassionately, think of them as humans with complex natures, than to be "right" and "meritocratic" and make them feel threatened and unworthy.
Just like a cashier at Chick-fil-a doesn’t necessarily condone the company’s religious and political beliefs.
From personal experience, I work for a big tech company which very publicly says it stands for certain things and the CEO recently has been going around saying a lot of political things. It’s unrelated to the job although it feels like an explicit part of the “company culture”. It doesn’t really affect my day to day work but the whole situation just feels weird. I didn’t sign up for a political party or to espose certain beliefs, I signed up to write code build a tech platform.
If your employer is out there making political statements or doing political things that you disagree with you should feel empowered to leave and find a new job. If you don't want employers making political statements or taking controversial political stances then vote for policies that encourage labor mobility so that the labor market can be free.
Unfortunately there are lots of policies and laws in place that prevent this kind of labor mobility and give the employer a huge amount of power.
What are those policies and laws? AFAIK employees can leave with at most 2 week notice and lot of places with just a days' notice.
Metoo movement in tech caused expulsions of many heads. Even if unrelated to the job.
Connections to Jeff Epstein is causing people to lose positions.
Political positions of support for Trump is causing customers to take stand against heads.
Where do we draw the line between association and belief and job?
Line: one's university has constraints in place to prevent donations from Epstein, and one does an end run around them in order to take donations from Epstein.
What about "weird" things like not being comfortable with taking on a new project with the military that ultimately helps kill people, or amassing as much personal data on the entire population as the NSA?
I mostly agree with your sentiment on the surface. Dont talk politics or religion at work, do your job, and things usually go just fine. But life is way too complex to label individuals' moral objections to employers crossing into controversial territory as weird.
Don't you think that civilians who die due to the military project think the same thing about the people who worked on it?
There's more to the world than you losing your job because people protested a military project. You participating in the project also has ramifications on other people's lives.
That's funny, since that is all the military does. I think what you meant to say was: "Don't force the view that you shouldn't force your view on others onto others"
This perspective is antithetical to democracy.
In fact, to demonstrate with an extreme, if you go all the way to building gas Chambers (just as an illustration), I'm totally okay having you be unemployed because I have a personal ethical issue with this.
I believe you, but the fact that they weren't working there creates a statistical bias in the sample, don't you think?
And yet, Google is still evil.
The new dimension these days is how many people you can rally to your cause and how fast you can do it. Social media and news media amplification gives anyone that power. It can be used and misused and managers are learning how to deal. It's all new so expect good and bad outcomes.
But don't expect people to stop pushing their agendas.
People go to work in big important companies like Google so that they can have more political influence. If you are techie interested in influencing future and politics, working inside tech companies might be a new avenue to influence the world. You believe X and you go to Google to push that X.
I don't know if this is effective way to influence. I'm just responding to the tone of your suggestion "people should know their place and use proper channels".
As corporations are increasingly using political power and influencing governments and the society why should workers keep politics outside workplace?
However there are a lot of beliefs that make this kind of approach unworkable.
If XYZ wants to believe that the earth is flat, sure, that can just be a personal belief and won't interfere with his work duties... well, unless he is launching satellites for NASA.
If XYZ is a furry and thinks anime girls in cat outfits are hot, sure, that's cool too. Also a personal belief that probably won't interfere with work.
If XYZ is an anti-vaxxer... well, probably won't interfere with their job unless they work in medicine. A dumb personal belief but this can probably stay personal.
But suppose employee XYZ runs a newsletter (in his own time) and publishes views about how Jews or women or black people or whatever are inferior. Can you really trust this employee to do his job at your company, where he might have to interact with people from those groups?
So, I don't think a naive approach of "just keep work and personal beliefs separate" covers 100% of situations.
I understand the arguments from a structural racism/sexism standpoint for treating those situations differently from the ones you describe, but the specific test you propose seems to fail just as much: can you trust someone who thinks men are inferior in a job where they might have to interact with men?
(I will note that your use of the male pronoun in describing the untrustworthy employee is itself interesting; not sure whether that's meant to be a gender-neutral "he" or whether you actually believe that only males can hold "undesirable" views.)
Politics in America runs about 50-50. Religion is similarly every person's preference.
Taking either of those to work is a formula for disaster. I'm just amazed that companies haven't done a better job of enforcing "Leave that at home" 'till now. It really wasn't a thing until a decade or so ago.
As a minion, you're discouraged from holding an opinion on company time, and even more strongly discouraged from doing anything that might affect the natural corporate power balance.
Active political engagement is a privilege reserved for upper management, who certainly won't be leaving their opinions at home.
politics "at work" is not the same as a company being involved in politics (or pushing for a particular political party).
Work time is time the employer paid you to do a job. Unless said job involves activism, engaging in such activism is not a productive use of your time.
It's easy to say this if your coworker likes football and you think sports are dumb.
But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say "Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay?
Yes yes, we can all dream up the very worst case scenario and other outliers. As someone else pointed out, companies generally have contract clauses that even govern social media whereby if you represent the company poorly you'll be fired. I'm sure that easily extends to your proposed sign waving homophobe.
The point the GP made was that most people have a lot more in common than they differ on, but in this hyper-politicized era those differences have been magnified to become an issue of pure division and likely shouldn't be brought into work with you.
See TikTok's banning LGBT content and Facebook's banning HIV drug awareness ads.
China owns TikTok
People are still largely extremely de-politized. The fact that people are starting to have opinions that they care about again, and this is immediately viewed as extremism is very telling.
What's the solution for the people in your country who are attending these rallies and holding up these signs?
This boycott model of employment will eventually have them fired from minimum wage jobs too. So where would these people work? They have a responsibility to contribute to society, make money, support themselves, pay taxes.
I would not like to see such people as my coworkers but I'm at a loss as to what should be done with them. As the years go by, robots will do more repetitive and manual jobs. Where would such people be exiled to work?
To a large extent, if we both showed up to work, accepted each other's pull requests, acted professionally and respectfully and went home, I'd be ok with it as a compromise.
Broadly though I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the prospect of someone exceptional who is working at a top tech company, with someone whose intelligence is low enough to advocate outright racism or bigotry. It seems like the example is very far fetched, and doesn't do much to advance whatever point you're trying to make.
I think it's probably best to use a more realistic example, wherein the prospect of working side by side with someone would honestly not be so daunting.
1) We have plenty of examples from the not-too-distant past of people who were very intelligent and yet definitely racists or bigots by anything resembling modern standards. I'm 99% sure Woodrow Wilson would do fine at a top tech company in terms of carrying out his work duties if he decided to work at one, for example. And he was racist by the standards of his own time, not just ours.
2) The boundaries of what constitutes "outright racism or bigotry" are not fixed, and have been changing quite rapidly in some demographics. My general impression is that 20-something graduates of the top 50 schools in the US have, on average, a very different definition of those boundaries from most 45-year-olds, or from 20-something non-college-graduates.
It's simple if the threshold for racism and bigotry is driven low enough that it ends up including the private beliefs of most of the country and even more of the world.
If you go back to 9/11 we saw this same type of reasoning where instead of "KKK", "terrorist" was used as a fringe stand-in to justify the draconian structure where crazy things like spying, witch-hunting / denial of due process etc. became the norm.
I remember watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in which they interview these sweet old people running a book club where they eat cookies and discuss books. A few weeks into it, the club members read an article in the paper that showed that one of their book club members was there under a fake name and was actually an undercover anti-terrorism police detective, which was confirmed by his department. Thereafter he explores the case of a retired old man who said critical things about President Bush at the gym and the FBI showed up to ask questions about him. (Around this timestamp: https://youtu.be/Q6lcP2f6Nvs?t=3515)
At this point, the co-worker's discomfort of working with an African-American or an openly gay person pretty much helps bring these issues out in the open rather quickly.
(And yes, I've been in a similar situation when a co-worker freaked out that I don't believe in Jesus, that I see the Bible as literature instead of factual, that I fully accept evolution as scientific fact, and yet I somehow see "Jesus" as a good role model for life.)
Spying is a very poor way to handle situations like this.
Instead, include some basic diversity training in all onboarding, and periodically renew it. It tends to scare away racists and homophobes.
OFC, this doesn't work in all circumstances, but, perhaps, it should be applied in all circumstances in which it _could_.
The point of tolerance is to tolerate.
Just because you have managed to find an intolerant viewpoint that survives our current memetic filter, does not change the reality that you're the one preaching intolerance, right here.
Hate movements throughout history have been supported by logical-sounding arguments for marginalizing some outgroup. I don't think that stoking rage against backwards political ideas is virulent enough to end in killing fields per se, but even the current increased polarization is not good.
I... don't think I agree? I would count un-inhibited self-expression if I were looking for a success metric of tolerance, not tolerance itself. (note: you'd need some other metrics lest THAT go off the rails, to be clear)
The idea that you have to tolerate the intelorant makes the original concept self-defeating; if you instead treat tolerance as a treaty, it's self-reinforcing.
You can interpret "tolerance" differently. I will continue to practice the version where I tolerate you until you are intolerant, at which point we'll have a conversation, and at which point I am morally allowed to no longer tolerate you.
This is rescinding a "right", not requiring action.
> Hate movements throughout history have been supported by logical-sounding arguments for dehumanizing some outgroup
This is a good point and I'll watch out for it. Rescinding tolerance does not have to equate with dehumanization... but yeah, I can see how that often leads there. Seems like an easy way to avoid it is, I could just stop tolerating bigotry, but still extend the compassion and tolerance that I am able to to bigots. Judge behavior rather than people. Which is... well, it's just good practice anyway.
No, it is actually not. It is self defeating.
The problem with giving "exceptions" for why you are now allowed to treat another person, in a horrible manner, is that humans are great at trying to take advantage of those exceptions.
Basically nobody who is doing horrible things to other people, believes that they are in the wrong. If you give people an excuse, then they will trick themselves into believing that their actions are not wrong, then they will gladly accept this excuse.
The only way to put a stop to this, is to just unilaterally reject certain behaviors, and say that you will not engage in it, even if you believe the other person "deserves" it.
Because if you let people decide that it is ok to do certain things, if the other person "deserves" it, well you are going to see that people will just find people who "deserve" it a whole lot of the time.
Seems to me the issue is poor self-examination.
If you feel like you're doing something because someone "deserves" it, you're doing it wrong; examine the what led yourself here to find out what it's really about.
I was giving a description of how "intolerance of intolerance" works out in practice.
It doesn't matter if you think these people are doing it wrong.
I do not believe that humans can be trusted to be given such an easy to abuse loophole, that gives them carte-blanche moral authority to act terrible to other human beings (because the the target of the abuse is "intolerant", and therefore deserve it).
It is safer to just say "no. You should not treat people poorly, even if you believe that they are intolerant, or deserve it because of some other quality".
I'm reminded of a description of "conservative" vs "liberal" wherein it's about risk management versus experimentation.
Right now, if I'm faced with a choice between accommodating people who are doing it wrong, or challenging those people to become more, I'm going with the second option. Then again, this might not result in a viable society; or perhaps just a viable large-scale society.
To put it another way: You can view the loophole as the problem, or you can view the attitude that finds loopholes acceptable to use the problem.
> You should not treat people poorly, even if you believe that they are intolerant,
I can treat people well whom I also do not tolerate. It's just that yeah, usually, those acting intolerant are also acting like assholes.
Including the cost of, say, being intolerant of intolerance of intolerance?
AFAIK, one of the major reasons to be intolerant of intolerance is to prevent lynchings.
Even if you think the other person deserves it, because of whatever excuse that you can think of, you still shouldn't act horribly, no matter the nice sounding justification that you can trick yourself into believing.
Humans are really good at tricking themselves into believing that their horrible behavior is justified.
In this specific situation, calling someone else intolerant is just an excuse that people will use to justify their horrible behavior to others.
> I will continue to practice the version where I tolerate you until you are intolerant, at which point we'll have a conversation, and at which point I am morally allowed to no longer tolerate you
Now apply that to my perspective here. I've judged that you're being intolerant. We're having that conversion, yet you're sticking to your intolerant viewpoint. So this means I no longer need to tolerate you, personally?
> if you instead treat tolerance as a treaty, it's self-reinforcing
Sure, but not in a good way. Framing it as a "treaty" implies a forceful ultimatum if it is broken. What you've actually created is a focal point of going after people that don't conform to your definition of tolerance.
> stop tolerating bigotry, but still extend the compassion and tolerance that I am able to to bigots.
This is another way of looking at it, closer to what I'm saying. Talking about "intolerance" in a vacuum doesn't really account for whether the magnitude is growing or diminishing - some tendency of de-escalation is required for things to settle out
The general consensus, at least around these parts, is that bigoted behavior is unacceptable. What's really under debate is when views (or even more tenuously, associations) are brought up by critics and reacted to as if they were actions. That tendency seems more akin to escalating aggression than resolving differences.
> getting a tattoo of a swastika
You can totally go get it. I won't welcome you back. You are no longer celebrating other people's self-expression, and so lose our celebration of yours.
> So this means I no longer need to tolerate you, personally?
Hmm... Yeah, seems reasonable. Here's a different approach:
It seems clear that most people are able to mostly tell when something intolerant is happening. So, look up the event chain: is this intolerance in response to intolerance, or is it response to something else?
> some tendency of de-escalation is required for things to settle out
Yes! Pretty sure the answer here is "forgiving tit-for-tat".
> are brought up by critics and reacted to as if they were actions
Which is (generally) really unfortunate :( I'd (generally) like to have tolerant discussions on views, but it's rare that people can do that. Where this generality can break is when the view is extreme enough that it undergoes a state change; as a friend puts it, "advocating genocide is not expressing an opinion"; although for me there's a step before that break that is "are you willing and able to discuss this as if you could be wrong."
Sorry, no, that is not tolerance. Rather it is political violence. Political violence may be justifiable, but needs to be argued for on its own merits - not couched as an exception to "tolerance".
> You can totally go get [a swastika tattoo]. I won't welcome you back.
I was examining your adherence to your statement that "un-inhibited self-expression if I were looking for a success metric of tolerance". You are now saying that you will discourage people from expressing themselves in ways you do not agree with. You can't have it both ways.
Apparently that lofty generality was just serving as a dog whistle, to be ignored for those whom you disagree with. Furthermore, you took my hypothetical and responded directly in terms of me, as if I am some "other" that is personally interested in getting a racist tattoo.
> It seems clear that most people are able to mostly tell when something intolerant is happening
Much of what one political team considers "activism" is perceived as intolerance by the other team, so where does that end up? Setting subjective feelings as a standard practically guarantees herd behavior.
> Yes! Pretty sure the answer here is "forgiving tit-for-tat".
And yet you have continued phrasing things in terms of ultimatums, where your judgment of someone's actions is justification to write them off in a larger way. Even if you yourself deescalate in your own personal interactions, what you've written directly supports escalation.
I stand by my original comment. You, right here, are fanning the flames of intolerance.
Person A says "Let's kill all of Group B"
Person B says "I won't tolerate Person A"
Person C says "I won't tolerate Person B"
Person A is being intolerant. They are breaking the terms of the notional peace treaty; the consequence of that is losing the right to be tolerated.
Person B is OK because Person A has lost the right to be tolerated. They are not breaking the notional treaty.
Person B is not OK because Person B has not lost the right to be tolerated. They are breaking the notional treaty.
As for the rest of what you're saying...
Yeah, I can see how that bat picture is off-putting. I don't always notice those kinds of undercurrents. Thanks for pointing it out!
> discourage people from expressing themselves in ways you do not agree with
You can, if your differentiator is along different axis. See the Person A/B/C example above.
> Furthermore
Thanks for expressing that you're picking this up. That's not something I'm putting down, so I'm not sure where that's coming from.
> perceived as intolerance
Yep. I don't yet have a way to address this en masse, although talking to individuals seems to work.
> Setting subjective feelings as a measure
...That seems appropriate? But you're right about the failure mode. I'd then say the issue isn't using this sensor we've all got, but in directly reacting to the results of that sensor. If your box is showing high CPU usage, and all you do is up the CPU...
> I stand by my original comment.
You do you, and I value that you're expressing what you're picking up. It's not what I'm putting down.
Rather what "Person A" is likely to have said is something civil that clashes with the dominant political team's reality distortion field. Rather than having to address the substance, those who disagree feign highly personal reactions as if a minority viewpoint is that "kill all" mortal threat, effectively resorting to the age old monkey status games for silencing dissent.
Person A: B raped a girl, so B doesn't tolerate women!
Person B: I did not!
Person C: I don't tolerate person B.
Person B's Friends: I don't tolerate person C since they broke the tolerance contract, B hasn't done anything.
Person C's friends: I don't tolerate B's friends since they broke the tolerance contract by not tolerating A.
Does this sound familiar? It was the start of the Tulsa massacre. If you say that "intolerance of intolerance" is a good thing then I take it that you think that the Tulsa massacre was warranted, since they were just intolerant of intolerant people right?
Edit: Or in the case of for example Damore:
Person A: There are inherent differences between group A and group B, so likely not all differences we see between them are due to discrimination.
Person B: I don't tolerate A's intolerance, he is clearly bigoted and thus broke the contract!
Person C: I don't tolerate B's intolerance, A might be misguided but didn't really show intolerance.
A, B and C now starts a verbal war causing several people to get fired on both sides before it calms down.
The Damore example is much better. I spent a long time going down that rabbit hole, and my conclusion is that he had a number of things that should have been considered and were not, in themselves, problematic, and he also had a number of things to say that were problematic, and he said many (but not all) of those things in ways that were problematic. The ensuing cultural conversation did the usual unfortunate thing, and devolve into black/white tribalism.
This is why I go first for a conversation with the Person As before deciding on courses of action.
Not op, but curious what actions or behavior you think becomes fair game.
In answering your question, it's more about reciprocation: if you make it comfortable for people to be who they are, we'll make it comfortable for you to be who you are; or the inverse. Which does have a strong element of "who did it first", but that's resolvable by risking the other person defecting while you cooperate and if they do that, well, doesn't really matter who did it first because it's clear who wasn't up for trying.
Picking out specific actions... I honestly don't know. We had a guy in one my communities get kicked out for doing this thing where he'd hear about someone's story about being a victim, and then retell that story in such a way that a) he was now that kind of victim and b) the original person now wasn't.
If you allow intolerant views, you normalise intolerance. If you normalise intolerance, you ALSO normalise intolerant acts, and they WILL follow naturally.
If you normalize cracking down on views on the basis that they're intolerant, the people who make that determination end up with a lot of unchecked power. In France, for example, you can be jailed for wearing a t-shirt that says "boycott Israel" today - it's hate speech. In Germany, many flags used in Rojava are banned as extremist symbols. And note that despite all these laws, RN and AfD still exist and thrive.
If you allow intolerance to spread, it WILL, without fail, hurt people. Sometime, immense number of people. This is not theoretical. It happens, again and again, and the only way to prevent it is to oppose intolerance at every stage.
Your abstract ideology of absolutely free speech is not in any way worth the immense pain and suffering that will, inevitably, follow.
On the other hand, policing actions is much easier, because the more consequential ones are also the more prominent - you don't need a surveillance state to deal with them, you just need a reaction force.
You most certainly can draw a line between actions and views, and fortunately most laws do.
Don't be friends with a racist. Make sure they understand their views are not acceptable. Do your part today.
In my experience, people are seldom racist for the sake of being hateful. Rather than applying an arbitrary label to someone so that you can lazily dismiss them as evil (which is just as bigoted as the bigotry you claim to oppose), it's better to find the underlying cause of the apparent racism, and addressing that concretely instead.
It's a complicated subject.
IMO, I don't see how someone can be a racist / homophobe in secret; thus I don't see a justification for spying on a co-worker just to find out things like this.
I don't follow? Maybe try rephrasing?
> can be a racist / homophobe in secret
I can kind of see that, but, the KKK wears hoods?
> I don't see a justification for spying on a co-worker
Hmm. I don't have an examined opinion on this, outside of general hesitation to go looking for problems for reasons such as confirmation bias and whatever the name is for what self-fulfilling-prophecies looks like this in kind of situation. Well, and maybe that if you're looking for justification you've already messed up. Just because you can somehow find a consolation prize doesn't mean you should have done something in the first pace.
Edit: You don't need to tolerate bad behavior, but it goes both ways: You can't justify bad behavior in the name of policing other peoples' dumb actions.
Or: Two wrongs don't make a right.
How do you differentiate between "biases" and "legitimate disagreement"?
I do it by exploring how much attention someone's paid to they path they took to where they are. Biases generally present as short, unexamined paths.
> Or: Two wrongs don't make a right.
I would agree. Too much of justice is about negative incentives.
If you have the time, I suggest reading "They Thought they Were Free," by Milton Meyer. It's a well-known book that tries to answer why generally "good" people joined or supported the Nazi party in pre-WWII Germany.
It's been about a decade since I last read it, but I keep it on my shelf. What I remember, though, is that the reasons why Germans joined or supported the Nazi party vary quite greatly. I remember one passage about a man who basically liked dressing up in Nazi uniforms because he loved pageantry of Nazi rallies. Another was about some Jewish children who saw a Hitler Youth parade in a movie theater newsreel, and really wanted to join.
It's well worth the read if you need to understand why hate groups are so attractive to some people. (Or, to basically "examine your biases" towards people who you have "legitimate disagreement")
That said, as legit as your recommendations are, I don't see how this answers my question:
How do you differentiate between biased and legitimate disagreement?
Neutral 3rd party?
But then how do you know the party is neutral?
That might be the culture I come from, but it is not my culture, and I do not subscribe to it, claim responsibility for it, or claim ownership of it.
Then again, there's not a lot of people in my culture, they're pretty spread out, and it's hard to get them together in one place to do our thing, soooo.
America is a lot of different cultures. Most places are. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats
For example, do you think that we should force Muslim Imams to wed gay couples? I believe that it would be a fairly controversial topic even in left-wing circles.
In the early social media days, I worked in a small team with a man and a woman for a couple of years. When FB came around we friended each other, and I found out that she was a very leftist lesbian and he was a conservative church leader. I was a libertarian-leaning atheist, so we made quite the trifecta.
It was never an issue, before or after, because we didn't bring any of the potentially contentious parts of ourselves into the work environment.
We can, and should, be able to present different personas depending on the company we are in. The inability to do so, rather than being a moral failing, is a sign of fanaticism.
At the extreme end your "interests" might be "preservation of my basic human rights." But once we agree that that's a valid political stance to bring to the office then the discussion shifts from "don't bring politics to work" to "where is the line?" and it forces the conversation to become more nuanced.
Aren't things like this governed by local laws? In Canada we have private insurance for things above and beyond basic health care, but only the government gets to decide who is a partner, dependant, etc...
> prayer rooms
Are they going to build chapels for every religion? Who decides which religions get chapels or prayer rooms? Or does only 1 religion get a prayer room because 2019 politics?
Nope. In many places in the states you have little to no protections. (You can be fired for being trans, for example.)
> Are they going to build chapels for every religion?
Most workplaces I've worked have had a 'quiet room' or similar that was designed to be a private space for personal prayer if needed. It had a chair and clean carpet, but was otherwise unadorned. It just couldn't be booked as a conference room. There are folks whose religions require them to pray during the day, and having a space to quietly do so seems (to me) to be reasonable?
Christians and Jews should be able to use them if they choose. I googled around and could only find statements that Muslim employees of a security contractor for amazon were not allowed to use the rooms for a while, but after protests and NLRB intervention now are.
It's like a millionaire eating at a restaurant, and instead of tipping the waitress he expects to be tipped by the waitress. The extra demands only leave a bad taste in everyone else's mouths.
I’ve worked at a (US) company with a prayer room that was used by some Muslim employees. As a Christian myself, I don’t think it would have been considered a problem if I used it when it was vacant to say a prayer, although my religious tradition doesn’t have the 5x/day prayer requirement like Islam does so I never did.
Consider going to a Muslim majority country where the religion controls the laws (like Indonesia) and /demand/ your Christian religious needs be accommodated.
From my studying, you would either be summarily dismissed or even possibly punished.
“ Amazon (for example) provided only space for Muslims to have prayer rooms, but no one else.”
I understood this to be a statement that Muslims, but no one else, where provided space for prayer rooms. It appears you meant something very different, so my criticism doesn’t apply.
You are correct that there are some very intolerant Muslim-majority countries out there in the world. It’s here in the United States that anyone, no matter their religion, can find freedom and accommodation. Land of the free and home of the brave, and all that.
The only reason Muslims get what they want is under the threat of violence. And US employers are scared of this, so they give in.
If not, this is just whataboutism. Just because other countries do something badly doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better.
That they are /importing/ that tyranny, and most people seem to be unaware of it.
Imagine if Buddists at Amazon had protested and demanded their own space for shrines? Or any other religion that has observational requirements?
The US is being blind to oppression of religious freedom under a false ideal of what that freedom really is.
Like... a prayer room? I'm imagining it now and... seems fine? It's hard to read your complaints as anything other than xenophobic, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the point you are trying to make?
No religion at school and no religion at work, it's a balance that makes sure one doesn't oppress the others.
When a group of people are given a pass because everyone is afraid of them, then we have the start of tyranny.
In reality most people just want to be allowed to do their own private thing and be treated well by others. Going into a room in private to practice your religion isn’t tyranny, it’s reasonable accommodation. They are no more going to enact a tyranny by doing this, than I do by making the sign of the cross when I eat my lunch at work, or that a Sikh coworker does by following his beliefs and wearing his turban, or a Jew his kippah, or so on...
Employers aren’t offering the prayer room because they fear violence, it’s because they want to appeal to their employees by giving them a comfortable and welcoming place to work.
Sharia law will be considered a religious right in the future in the US. And because we were hypocrites before, we will be hypocrites again. And if you don't think Sharia law will bring violence with it, I can provide links for you to study.
How is a room available to everyone tyranny?
You can't demand anything in the US right now from an employer on the basis of religion unless you are of one religion. All the others are ignored, or wouldn't even dare to make demands.
And this is done under the threat of violence from that religion.
In the US this is governed by a patchwork of federal, state and local laws as well as employer policies.
On the flip side, where do you draw the line? It's one thing not to work someplace, it's another to protest your own employer because they are not accommodating you with prayer rooms onsite.
What’s definitely optional is for a company to take a stance on a political issue just because a vocal minority of their employees demands that.
Seems like that has more to do with the things you find weird than some kind of politics.
If you're a"normal" person and like"normal" things you can do just fine with an attitude like that.
Some people are different.