Stop Firing the Innocent
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I have little doubt that I could pick a stranger at random, create a social media post with some baseless accusations and fabricated screenshots and get it shared extensively.
I really hope our society can find a way out of this, but I honestly don't see it.
I agree that we are unlikely to find our way out of it any time soon, because the dominant majority is entirely unwilling to give up its institutionalized advantages.
Those of us who want real change here should have a strong interest in preventing the stories described in the article. You're right that we need people to want to change, and I'm afraid that these incidents give more ammunition to racists than they galvanize anti-racists. They certainly don't help to convince anyone in the middle to join our side.
As someone who wants to see these problems fixed - permanently - I’m just not sure that this approach gets us closer.
If it’s a drop in the bucket that discourages a large number of people from throwing their weight behind the solutions offered, then it’s no longer a drop in the bucket.
Sure, until it's you.
The way to resolve and defuse conflicts is to treat others better than they deserve to be treated. This is also more effective politically. See the second example in the article where research indicated that peaceful protests promoted by MLK were more effective than race riots later.
This result should not be a surprise. MLK promoted peaceful protests exactly on the theory that they would be more effective, based among other things on the experience of Ghandhi in India. Those lessons were copied a generation later and played a critical part in bringing down the Iron Curtain.
Violence begets violence. Forgiveness begets peace. Going out of your way to treat people with fairness is not just the right thing to do, it is also more effective.
If you're willing to ruin innocent lives to further your cause, then I cannot comprehend how it makes you morally superior to _them_ (whoever _they_ might be)
Are you keeping the score somewhere? Something like: "Today, we got 11 majority people fired for petty reasons, but it's Ok as it will improve the lives of 18 minority people"
No, I am not "willing to ruin innocent lives". I regard these cases as deplorable but inevitable statistical anomalies being highlighted inappropriately.
> Are you keeping the score somewhere?
I suppose that in a broad sense, I am. I don't believe that innocent people are being unjustly ruined as racists for no reason en masse. I think there's a handful of these cases.
In contrast, consider the ridiculous incarceration rates for Black Americans: 1 in 3 Black men will spend time behind bars in their lifetimes, while the rate for all US men is 1 in 17. That's millions of lives ruined.
So I will get worked up for each one of these cases in isolation. But I'm not going to allocate my outrage disproportionately to the tiny minority while ignoring the vast majority.
in other words, acceptable casualties in the war you're waging. nice.
It's not a zero-sum conflict. When the bonds of ethnic loyalty are weakened and the bonds of cosmopolitan amity are strengthened, we all win, and our lives are all enriched.
As for "acceptable casualties": I certainly would not go along with such injustices as the three anecdotes described in the article if they were playing out before me. Outside of my own limited sphere of influence, I am not cursed with the responsibility of making judgment calls as to what is "acceptable" — yet I can still aspire to weigh the suffering of all parties.
Outing and destroying people who are not racist makes examples of them. Examples that are to be hoped to make people too afraid to speak out against the agenda.
As http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html points out, this strategy is used by groups that believe that they have power..but only barely. The problem is that if they prove to have less power than they think, the resulting backlash hurts them.
Mark my words. That kind of backlash is part of what allowed Trump to get elected the first time. And if conflict intensifies, it will help his prospects of getting re-elected. And this is not just any election year. 2020 is census year - the state legislatures elected this year will redraw Congressional districts. We have been suffering for the last 10 years because the 2010 elections were dominated by opponents of Barack Obama and their districts favor Republicans. Do we really want the 2020s to be similarly suffering the fallout against overreach by the BLM movement?
There will always be such examples. Eradicating them entirely is a statistical impossibility. No social movement is perfect. No matter how much effort you put into perfecting it, the opposition will find fault with it.
Does that sound like a winning movement formula to you?
And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Your own side should condemn cases like those mentioned in this article far more than your "opposition".
Even though you don't care about these people nor about any other collateral casualty, pretending to care will at least give the signal to those on the fence that there's the possibility that the mobs might stop doing this crap, at least eventually.
If those on the fence realize that you don't care about them, they might stop caring about you and anything you might have to say.
> And if it does, all the panic in this thread about ruining people's lives will come to nothing because having somebody fired unjustly was never in anyone's interest. It was just an isolated edge case being blown out of proportion.
Those who were part of the mobs that ruined these people's lives cared enough to, well, ruin their lives, so the "not in anyone's interest" part is already false from the get go.
But there's something far more worrying here than the falsehood. Let's assume these are edge cases—even though we all know these are three examples among many—what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"? Something awful was done to these people and some of us are talking about it.
Should we... Not talk about it? What exactly is the point here?
> Suggesting that such outliers represent "bloodthirst" in the wider movement is a great example of fear-mongering and blowing things out of proportion.
These are examples of blood thirst. Again, should we just ignore them? Why?
For what it's worth I don't expect to persuade anybody of anything. I think that's unrealistic, even if learning from each other is not.
> what exactly do you mean by "blown out of proportion"?
These events occupy a tiny corner of a much larger picture of human suffering. Talking about them in isolation, as if the rest of the picture doesn't exist, is wrong.
Conservatives always bring up the “The Three Boxes of Liberty”. Minorities took their advice - it’s time for the third box.
One minority has. Don't presume that the rest of the minorities are with them; progressives have made it clear that they are no friends of theirs. Some recent examples are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23407254 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652659 .
Yes I realize that Clinton and Biden were the architects of the “War on Crime” in the 90s - AKA “The War on Black Folks” along with profiling during stop and frisk.
This time in US is different. This time the elites, the scholars and especially the scholars, the media... They collectively endorsed and encouraged the mob justice and the cancel culture. I'm pretty pessimistic this time. I think this is the future of the US since people who do have a platform do not speak out and will not speak out.
That's false. In fact, attempting 反思历史 is the quickest way to get into serious trouble with the party, and one will find oneself soon be "drinking tea" with the authorities, or have one's livelihood taken away, or worse.
Hell, it wasn't even that many decades ago that lynchings were commonplace. And that's a much worse form of mob justice than outraged tweet brigades that occasionally get someone fired.
This is a problem.
And even if it was less of a problem than it was a decade ago -- and I don't think it is -- we should still look for ways to fix it.
James Damore is gainfully employed. Steve Hsu is still a tenured professor, Justine Sacco had a new job within a month, George Zimmerman is able to make a better living than most by selling murder memorabilia.
Read this whole thread.
He has been defamed as a pedophile by a stalker, and has been denied several six figure paying jobs 3-4 interviews into the hiring process explicitly because one guy decided to cancel him. The stalker says he monitors court records to prevent Josh from restarting his career by changing his name. Josh is now unemployable and living in Serbia.
Bio on the stalker:
Samuel Collingwood Smith is a yellow journalist who specializes in defamation and stalking. After a brief stint as a British council member, he publicly embarrassed himself by claiming his political enemies were sexual abusers of children. Without a job, he indulged in an obsession with Evanescence and attempted to become ring leader of Internet fan clubs about Amy Lee. In his quest to become her #1 fan, he would bully, harass, and stalk underage girls who held forum moderator positions above him. More than five years later, he threatens them legally if they speak on what abuse he submitted them to. After a falling out with Evanescence staff, he accused the band of being child pornographers and was forced into a permanent contract which requires he never speak of Amy Lee or Evanescence again. Despite parliamentary petitions to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement, he is legally bound to this day.
Since then, Samuel Collingwood Smith has trailblazed the Internet leaving behind countless smear campaigns purporting anyone he does not like to be involved in child pornography somehow. An emotionally unstable adult-child who focuses much of his time on GamerGate and relevant topics, he is well known as a public menace to local constables and courts. Writing under multiple pen names, including Vordrak and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, he romanticizes the English witch hunter by the same name. He hides behind this intimidating Internet persona and openly calls himself a terrorist. His mission statement is "to expose corruption and terrorise the guilty without worrying too much about due process."
> The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users
And he thinks that a stalker is why he gets dropped at the background check phase?
Among the lies, is a quote attributed to Josh that someone added to his Encyclopedia Dramatica page, which the person later removed with the reason: ""sorry, I made this up".
Are you arguing that the central claim: that kiwi farms doxxes and harasses people is untrue?
http://www.kiwifarmswiki.com/index.php?title=Joshua_Conner_M...
This is the self-referential page created by the stalker in order to defame Josh. I am not referring to the Wikipedia page on Kiwi Farms.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/owner-of-christchurch-s...
Josh moon built a site that actively encourages harassment of innocent people online. That's unquestionably true. It's no wonder people don't want to employ him. He continues to work to improve the site and associate with it and actively engage in the harassment in some cases.
I cannot believe people are defending him.
It's a site which hosts a bunch of stalkers, doxxers and people whose sole purpose is to harass and ruin the lives of others. Anyone defending it is massively suspect to say the least. He wasn't 'cancelled' for wrongthink, he's been ostracized because he actively involves himself in making others people's lives worse.
In my opinion, you have to present at least a minimum level of decency towards society in order to take part in society, of which being employable is one facet. By running Kiwi Farms, Mr Moon simply doesn't reach this level imho.
It claims Josh is an anti-semite. What does it cite to back this up? It cites a picture of a tweet hosted on the website on Mathew Hopkins, Moon's stalker.
http://matthewhopkinsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Moo...
I used to follow Josh on twitter before he got banned, and that wasn't even his twitter account.
Other folks have gotten the same treatment as well. The stories come up from time to time if you pay attention.
Most cases never make it that far. You have just enough that if any employer Googles someone before hiring, they don't get the job. If you have a half-dozen angry blog posts, or a local newspaper article or two, or a bunch of Twitter posts accusing you of something nasty, that's enough.
You're hiring someone for your team. If you have a choice between two job candidates, one where you see a half-dozen articles claiming they're racist, and one without, whom do you pick?
I know the choice I'd make. I don't want to deal with potential management problems.
Heck, even if you've sued a former employer (with good and legitimate reasons), why would someone pick you, knowing you're the sort of person who sues? Especially given I have no way to evaluate if the law suit was reasonable? Or if you've been involved in some conflict. Do I really want to sort out that mess? Or do I just give your resume a yellow flag, and pick someone without any yellow flags, if available.
In an up economy, where labor is scarce, you'll do fine. In a down economy where jobs are scarce, if you've got bad things about you on the internet, or even potentially yellow flags (e.g. some visible law suit or conflict), you've got a problem.
And yes, I can think of a couple of cases off the top of my head who have been through this, but I don't want to go Streisand Effect on people who'd much rather have normal, private lives.
What a "so". There's simultaneously so much confidence and so much innumeracy packed into it.
It's impressive how much a mere two letters can communicate.
I can kinda understand the rest but I never understood this one. It feels like an attack against critical thinking and reason.
Honestly, I think the only way to combat this is to make taking these actions expensive for those who do that. The twitter rage/grievance machine is running on all cylinders.
That and making sure that companies that succumb to the mob, are roundly and publicly held to account for that. If they can't be bothered to make rational choices, then find alternatives to patronize.
Why are they still your friends?
I disagree, sometimes deeply, with some of my friends. I also don't like echo chambers, as no original thought occurs there. Just an attempt to negate the "other". Which is completely counterproductive to having a rational dialog.
Something is horribly wrong.
This sort of stuff used to be called "flame bait" back in the day. Don't take the bait. It's just not worth caring about, no matter if it's a professor doing it or a basement dweller.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- Cardinal Richelieu
Adding to the above, the current administration has proved time and again that they're not up to the job.
And finally, the wave of (out)rage currently unfolding in the US, celebrated by many as a good thing is in reality a terrible thing - the problem of racism in the US is so complex that it is impossible to solve it by using force (condemnations, firings, banishment, verbal and physical violence). This also applies to sexism and other -isms: it takes brains and willingness to spend the time (years to decades).
Those events are yet another social flare-up that will take its course and then fizzle out.
I wonder how the last witch hunt ended, and if that might be applicable here.
I also fully expect to see comments demanding that the article author, Yascha Mounk, be fired for daring to imply that something else might be of comparable importance to the witch hunt.
Personally, I work in a great place (large R&D lab), enjoy a lot of respect and an almost complete technical freedom to pursue interesting projects, good salary (not FAANG-level, but plenty for a comfortable life), etc. and I am seriously considering bugging out, at least for a year or two, exactly because of witch hunts. Our management is sane, but should I end up in a wrong bucket (and I will not participate in a witch hunt and will speak for a friend if he is attacked, so it is possible) no one would be able to save my ass.
A couple of friends that work in small companies (20 ppl or less) generally report a much saner environment, with no company-level witch hunts. I wonder if this is true overall -- smaller companies focus less on external politics and more on technical tasks, allowing employees to participate in politics, or not, in their free time.
It's a different feeling to require a different set of emotions, opinions, and accounts, just to feel ease within a group (civilians) who may or may not have their own agenda to ruin your life for personal gain, as opposed to a corrupt government bent on silencing dissidence.
Keep your identity small — http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
What you cannot say — http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I assume that you aren't LGBT. Because we've been getting fired and murdered over failures to compartmentalize since time immemorial; our right to employment was only confirmed by the supreme court this month.
Extend this game of appearance to personal life, as others can capture your personal life and post it on twitter; then look at the consequences: losing the livelihood.
A lot of this whining about celebrities (and sometimes others) getting canceled stinks of special exceptions in employment law being made for people who say offensive things. That's even dumber than the religious carve-outs, i.e. the rights that have been exclusively granted to people who believe things that cannot by definition be proved, and that if you fail to have beliefs that cannot by definition be proved (no matter how minority, or how discriminated against) you are excluded from.
The problem is the lack of process. I don't somehow care more about the suffering of people who have tweeted things that look racist to someone, than the suffering of others fired because they were accused of being unproductive on the job then fired with no hearing or documentation of that lack of productivity, or somebody fired because the company thought it would be cheaper to outsource their job.
The idea that random companies and academic institutions carry the authority to either define somebody as racist, or can lose that authority to credibly point out racism by unfairly exercising it is laughable. Maybe, instead, random companies shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily take away someone's living by a functional government working in the public interest.
Seems a lot of people getting angry at ghosts/ideas("cancel culture"/"mob mentality" - a mob against "mob mentality") or people doing technically legal things(taking a picture in public, calling a business to voice a complaint). Those ghosts/people didn't actually fire the guy, his company did.
It'll be impossible to stop trolls. You can't just say "knock it off guys", nor can you ban people from taking pictures or voicing an opinion. However, you could put some restrictions around firings, but many would view that as stifling business, so this is the outcome instead. What may or may not have been a knee-jerk firing, but that's the cost of "at-will" employment.
Also, there is a devils advocate point to be made in that corrupt police unions have created difficulties with removing bad cops from the field, so this can be a double-edged sword. Overall employer/union accountability needs to be higher when it comes to who they hire and who they fire.
He fired his own daughter but this was insufficient: not only did virtually all his customers abandon him immediately but his landlord revoked his lease (how can a landlord do that? I have no idea).
So basically his entire business was destroyed overnight in response to something he didn't even do himself.
A lot of these firings are driven by fear of customer boycotts. And the customer boycotts are driven by fear of more boycotts/outrage/etc... it's a circle of destruction.
"God already punished you for being black, so why would you make it worse by being gay. #shitpeopleinmyfamilysay!! Haha"
They found themselves in hot water after posting about their allegiance with BLM, which has been a marketing bandwagon as of late. This leads to people digging into how sincere these businesses are, and finding a cache of noxious racist tweets by the director of a business, who is the CEO's daughter, is basically going to sound the death knell for a small business.
Maybe before posting about your family's business' allegiance to a hot-button cause related to black people and racism, think about deleting all those racists tweets you made years ago talking about how black people should be eradicated, using the n* word with monkey emojis, and your posting of swastikas. Think about how this could impact the people around you, including your family, your customers, and other businesses who support you.
I don't blame their landlord for wanting run away from any association with her toxic tweets, and likely there is a clause within their lease agreement allowing the breaking of the lease due to certain behavior.
Just seems we’re in the perfect storm for cherry picking outrage these days. But it’s hard to know if there’s a new or statistically novel pattern occurring.
There was no good intention here, these are just power trips. These people's lives were damaged/ruined for no legitimate reason.
I feel like they both focused on the violent riots and ignored/diminished them. This way they gave the impression of a strong bias with not enough coverage of the distinction between the huge number of peaceful protests and the riots.
In my opinion had they been more focused on how the riots where taking advantage of the protests (also focusing on how this should not diminish the importance of either) the media could have shown a less biased wider support for the just cause of the protests.
To me it looks like they have been quite opportunistic while pretending not to be so.
In the early 80s, one of the top-rated shows featured a Dodge Charger with a Confederate flag on the roof and a horn that played 'Dixie'. I don't recall hearing any objections, even from the brave men and women of the civil rights movement. Tom Petty (who tended to lean left, politically) toured with the Confedrate flat. I knew people with flag tattoos (usually with text like 'Born to raise hell' or something similar). Poltical candidates of both parties (including Bill Clinton) had backers that distributed campaign buttons with the flag.
But that changed. The flag became a divisive symbol. I recognized it myself when Dr. Ben Carson said he found it offensive. At that point, I changed my attitude towards the flag, but I remembered the time when it was not offensive.
I feel bad for people like Civil War re-enactors, or history buffs that invested in memorabelia. Their hobbies are now hallmarks of racism. I don't see where they have much choice but to give them up.
So today the 'ok' symbol is racist and can get someone fired. What comes tomorrow? Clicking a pen? Snapping your fingers? There's no telling.
Pepe the frog went that way, as far as I can tell. Is Kermit next? How about Bugs Bunny? There's no telling.
I hope it stops.
The article suggests Cafferty made the inverted Ok hand gesture, because he was being lazy with his arm hanging outside of his truck.
If you believe Cafferty (and for the record I find it entirely plausible), then his casual expression was misinterpreted by a narrow community (the man's twitter followers), who in turn lobbied SDG&E to fire the employee. WOW!
Remember when the internet was the place where you could find your own community of like minded individuals, because living in society in the physical you just can't make the numbers?
Second, it seems Cafferty accidentally made the wrong hand gesture to the wrong person. This reminds me of classic stories of gang violence, where an unsuspecting outsider walks into a community and their mode of dress has encoded meaning--leading to a violent response.
Memes appear on the scene, and some take hold (I heart NY) and stick around, and others die out. variation-replication-selection, repeat.
> “If I was a white supremacist,” he told me, “I would literally have to hate 75 percent of myself.”
Anyway, agreed hating folks for the sake of it is pointless. Whatever group you choose to hate on.
> Remember when the internet was the place where you could find your own community of like minded individuals, because living in society in the physical you just can't make the numbers?
That's...exactly what this is an example of, actually.
We can (we must!) turn the left against cancel culture if the left is to regain the moral high ground and the trust of the voters. And, ironically, we'll make more progress that way on the issues that progressives care about than by using their methods.
The truth is, people are fired for arbitrary and unfair reasons constantly. I'd imagine 1 out of a million times someone is fired for unfair reasons it has something to do with cancel culture.
(You could argue that I'm engaging in a "True Scotchman", but see this article [1]:
> Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
)
[1] https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
Like teacher's unions.
The issue in the US is that the labour market is incredibly unjust towards employees and they have almost no rights.
Because the UK still has full EU law in its statute books, and it's home to a guy who was just fired for flying a airplane banner saying "White lives matter". Oh, they didn't just fire him, his girlfriend was also fired (from a different company) ... just for good measure.
But if he can sue and force them to rehire him I'd be very surprised. The problem is not merely what the law says, but that the institutions that enforce employment law are just as corrupted as everywhere else.
The problem is that corporations are too large.
If a company wants to fire you over nonsense but there are 30 others in the same city who pay the same salary for the same work, they're doing you a favor. You don't want to work for a company like that anyway, when there are better alternatives.
When they're the only employer who will hire you without having to move your kids to another school district or take a salary cut by changing fields, you need them more than they need you and getting fired over nonsense is a major problem.
Make corporations smaller and more numerous and you don't need unions. This also happens to have major benefits for competition on the consumer side, so everybody wins.
Thank you for the insightful comment, I feel like this may actually change some of my own opinions.
That's a little distinct from cancel culture overall, though, since there's still the question of boycotting people/organizations who demonstrably have done unethical things or hold unethical views. I tend to compartmentalize the work from the person more than some, but I don't begrudge people wanting to distance themselves from that - only when they do so without evidence of actual wrongdoing.
I’m not old enough to have experienced when this sort of thing happened historically, but it certainly feels like we’re inexorably marching toward a violent breakdown of our society. It’s scary.
Maybe one day America will get there.
- It is not the only solution and I definitely don't want anyone to go there.
- ... but the way things are happening right now it seems like a very possible that it might happen.
This is sad: I see so much hate even here. Why can't 2nd amendment people realize that banning E2E encryption is just another way to make ordinary people powerless? And why can't we see that there are legitimate reasons why the second amendment is there?
Why do we people here have to brag about how much they hate their relatives? It is sickening! We surely don't have to agree with our parents, siblings and other relatives in everything, and I certainly dont agree with HN in everything either but finding common ground seems important to me.
Otherwise, if you are asking for protection of those not firmly established as guilty of certain accusations, you are advocating for a double standard designed to delegitimize pressure in that area, not for protection of the innocent in any principled way.
Seeing as going to war and accepting civilian casualties has only been acceptable for the entirety of human history up to and including the present, I’m not so sure.
No one is required to continue with their past buying habits once their mind has changed.
The word 'mob' implies unregulated violence, usually based on emotion and not reason. And the vast majority protesting racism appear to be peaceful and thoughtful.
That is correct but it’s not relevant to the specific scenario brought up here, which is if you’re on the wrong side of a group that is not peaceful and thoughtful. Those who are in such a position often receive death threats. The outrage of the internet that has latched on to something it wants to believe can lead to remarkably mob-like behavior, though with less physical violence usually.
Edit - sometimes you get horribly downvoted, but still stand by the comment. Few downvoting really have an appreciation for how horrific US history has been. For example I encourage you to read this article on lynching
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-me...
Indeed, fear itself is not mob justice, rather, the actions of the mod itself is mob justice.
> emotionally raw time ...
This was a thing before the riots too. The Stallman case happened last year for example.
> Downvotes are expected from those ignorant of history ;)
I do not think that anyone sane is doubting the historical mob justice against certain groups. It is just that just as these instances of mobbing were wrong so are the modern ones. (plus I believe that some of the people downvoting do so due to how us-centric this comment is)
This argument boils down to whataboutism if you dig down under the overly emotional packaging. This is not bringing anything to the discussion, it is an attempt to shut down the discussion. This is why you are getting downvoted.
However, what these stories seem to have in common is lack of due process: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on [1].
Maybe people should get off Twitter and put some work (or money) into actual organisations that engage in concerted political effort to change things.
[1] Not Mark Twain... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
But here’s a take: cancel culture is not new, it’s just changed direction and is scaring the pants off people who previously had the luxury of ignoring it (or taking advantage). What happened to Cafferty is a shame, but the article left out another person who was cancelled over a vicious lie: Emmett Till.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-me...
I realize yours is far from the only account stoking the flamewar in this thread, but this example was noticeable even in this wretched context.
I mean one just needs to look at what happened during Gamergate for an example of what I'm talking about. That said, it's obvious that those same types of people are weaponizing it against otherwise innocent people which means we need to do better at fixing things that end up wrong.
Or even today if you don’t “look like you belong”.
And since this phenomenon is affecting the income and livelihood of individuals, the only people that are safe are yet again the rich.
The middle-class are tearing themselves and the poor up for the sake of appearances.
My thinking on this has changed based on circumstances. My current thinking is that we need to shut down Twitter and Facebook for six months. World wide.
I know this is harsh. I know they do a lot of good. And I know this is difficult yet doable (they don’t own their domains, they are borrowed).
And yet the world existed just fine before Twitter and Facebook.
Things have gotten out of hand. More harm will come out of this kind of irresponsible unchecked mass communication. These companies don’t seem to care about the damage they enable through their flawed technology. They enable real white supremacists, terrorists, cancel culture warriors, child pornographers, human traffickers and all kinds of criminals to form massive groups and organize action like never before in history.
I’ve said it before, for all their technical prowess they sure have shitty algorithms, lousy rules of operation, nonexistent customer service and no accountability.
For example, How hard would it be to classify post subject matter and throttle comment rate to one per 60, 30, 10, 5 or 1 minutes?
Can’t classify reliably? 60 minutes between comments.
Groups on FB? Your content is deleted every 30 days so you can’t accumulate walls of hatred. Also, all group owners and moderators must use real names and submit identification, maybe even post a bond refundable after a period of time. Don’t like it? Go start a website.
I know a bunch of the above is crazy. Sorry. I am angry. I started with the Internet before most people knew it existed. Before that it was services like Compuserve.
There was great hope for the internet and the enlightenment it could bring to society. And, for the most part, it has done far more good than harm.
Yet there are a handful of companies, including “news” outlets who have managed to use the Internet to defecate and vomit all over society. And they don’t seem to care at all. Anything from lies to orchestrating mob attacks on individuals, businesses and institutions —even history— is fair game.
They have enabled the lowest of society to engage in mob rule in exchange for returning profits to their investors.
This is where Silicon Valley is to blame as well. For all their virtue signaling they seem perfectly fine with focusing their money and resources getting people to click on stuff. I have yet to see any of these virtuous individuals apply a significant amount of time, money and effort towards fixing the shit culture that produces companies who seem content with being the conduit for hatred and destruction.
Bravo!
Take Twitter and Facebook off air for six months. Force them to think about what they are doing and find solutions. Send a solid message to others (media/news) that being conduits for destruction and radicalization has consequences.
Maybe, just maybe, we come out of such an experience with the Internet we all thought we were going to enjoy. One that would enlighten, elevate and unite people. An internet that would erase inequality, bigotry and racism. One that would eventually even remove borders and unite all on this blue marble and move humanity towards an unimaginably great future.
/s
Ironically we live in a society that now claims more than ever to know what it means to "do right", but that growing moral burden of "doing right" produces an ever greater internal sense of shame (for missing the mark) that is often projected outwards onto easy targets. Outrage is what wins eyeballs in the media, because messages of shame penetrate to the core. Thanks to social media, these messages clone themselves far more easily. Acts of injustice stir up outrage via a message of shame, and the cycle often perpetuates itself with further acts of outrage/injustice.
America has a growing self-righteousness induced shame problem is what this is, and until we identify that source of grace [1] that can transform sin into honor, shame into dignity, and moral outrage into forgiveness, it will only continue to worsen. Yes, we are to have deep sorrow and compassion regarding acts of injustice, but grace and forgiveness are the only legitimate exits from the emotional/spiritual burdens they impose.
[1] Romans 8:1-2
It appears that with the decline of the Church all that's happened is people invented a new one, but a rather nasty one that sounds a lot like the religions of a couple thousand years ago: obsessed with converting heretics whether they want to be converted or not, a whole lot of destruction of pagan idols, making people into martyrs and so on.
On balance, given a choice between the kind of hate filled behaviour the article describes, or God-fearing people, I'd much rather be around the latter. And if forced to choose a tribe I guess I'd pick them too, as the modern religious seem much nicer, calmer and more accepting than the "woke".
I am so tired of watching journalists repeat this irresponsible lie. The "white power" symbol was the result of a spontaneous flashmob campaign to prove that journalists will pick up and run with any ridiculous "trend" that fills their demand for racism. I challenge anyone to find a legitimate link explaining the relationship between the symbol and white supremacy that doesn't ultimately lead to a journal article sourced from cherry picked Twitter threads.
Journalism died when ideologues normalized activist journalism. We are in the midst of a mass hysteria and media outlets are fully culpable. 70 years ago we called it McCarthyism.
If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the media took the bait?
This was around the same time they also tried to take credit for the Steele dossier, claiming they had made it all up and what not. In either case, when people started ironically using it to troll, others started using it unironically as a dogwhistle.
https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-...
They attribute it to 4chan.
There are multiple photo examples of white supremacists in 2015 and 2016 using the OK symbol as a link to Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of them and Pepe was often shown using the OK symbol during any support of Trump. The reality is that the white supremacist supporters of Trump were already using that symbol to designate their support for him.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mozilla-ceo-resignation-i...
* Was person X bigoted?
* Was the 'punishment' befitting what they did?
Well, donating against gay marriage is some big-government bigoted shit, not gonna lie. You can still ask the second question, though.
I wouldn’t want someone in a position of power that went to Klan rallies on the weekend either. They aren’t going to outright say they are discriminating against you. They are going to say the person isn’t a “culture fit”.
I can imagine two CEO's of companies A and B (which each own exactly 50% of an industry and are precisely equivalent in public visibility and internal policy). The CEOs are also identical in every way except that one supports a opinion M and the other supports a opinion M'
Assuming that they both make public their support, which one would get executed in the court of public opinion? Would it be fair for (any)one of them to get expelled from his/her post just because the masses collapsed the narrative to uphold either only M or M'? (I'm assuming that whether M or M' is the majority opinion is irrelevant)
The only solution I can see is that both CEOs collude and decide to either not support anything, or support the same, agreed-upon thing.
Assuming that is so, what if we extend this past 2 companies, and into 2000?
----
I'm not convinced that the punishment does befit the situation.
CFA's entire organization is built around family values and good Christian values. It starts from the ground level -- you can't become a manager without the company checking your friends and family. So that type of sentiment pervades the organization. The comments and donations were mostly in line with company culture. This isn't to say every CFA employee was anti-gay-marriage, but they value family enough that it is plausible that the employees would support the COO.
Mozilla is the opposite situation, emphasizing diversity and trying to cater to the (generally more socially liberal) tech community at large. Eich's donations flew in the face not only of the values Mozilla were trying to espouse, but also directly affecting a nontrivial number of its employees.
If Mozilla had the culture of CFA, Eich wouldn't have been removed. In order to uphold their image, Mozilla couldn't have kept him.
That someone supports the concept of "punishment" for expressing a view different from what you (and some collection of people) arbitrarily believe should be a widely held view ... is ... unconscionable. And quite frightening.
There's literally a science fiction short story about this. And it doesn't end well. I have to look up the title, haven't read it in 35 years or so.
a. work for you
b. use your products
unless the guy goes.
That's a free action by free individuals. And the idea that we would force individuals to work for people they don't like or that we'd force individuals to use products from people they don't like is authoritarian.
Freedom to choose to work with someone also involves the freedom to choose to not work. Freedom of speech gives you the ability to say you like things and also say you don't like things.
So he supported a ballot proposition which won. That was a majority political position.
Majority political positions can still be morally wrong.
I smiled and ignored them. I subconsciously made sure to avoid their input on important things.
The narrative was in-your-face progressive activist SJW to the max. Many people I privately spoke with in the company were sick of this idiocy, but couldn't see themselves speaking up, as they needed the job. They couldn't risk being fired by the company.
Imagine if you had to live that life.
Companies should not have political opinions or leanings.
Women and minorities have had to do exactly that. For decades. Which is where the backlash right now is coming from. Not just in one meeting but in most meetings. Talk to them, they almost all have hours of stories and examples.
Overt in school and grad school. Less overt but still there in professional life.
My family including my wife and daughter are minority and multiracial.
Stop with the whataboutism already.
I could see future societies tearing down statues of anyone who ate meat. Or anyone who opposed the legalization of cannabis. Society's morals drift in unpredictable ways. If we choose to judge everyone (past and present) by our current views, we'll never stop tearing down statues and renaming things.
The only way to prevent this is to recognize that people are products of the societies they grow up in. If either of us were born in the 1700s, we'd probably think slavery was acceptable. In general, people back then weren't evil, they were mistaken. And you don't punish mistakes by ruining someone's life and legacy, especially if the society around them is the reason for those mistakes. The same should be true for us today.
Also, "big-government bigoted shit" would have to describe literally every government in human history before the year 2001 when the Netherlands formally recognized same-sex marriage as equivalent to opposite-sex marriage.
That's the funny thing about bigotry. It doesn't matter how big your posse is. You can still be bigoted. For instance, oppression of the Uighur community is generally tolerated in China. The support is greater than the 52%. Still bigotry.
And because my society is free, you get to say, "Oh okay, I'll do what you want" or you can say "Fine, don't use the product". We're just people interacting freely. And thank god for liberty.
In the case of Mozilla, he wasn't only accused of supporting gay marriage, he donated money to groups whose goals were to get people to vote against gay marriage. There weren't actions taken due to misunderstandings as far as I know.
Also I think strong opposition to him as a CEO came from the employees, not outside partners cutting ties to avoid being associated.
These are the same type of people who a generation earlier supported laws against interracial marriage.
Also, if lots of your employees threaten to quit, your company has a big problem. The examples in the article were about individual employees, two of which had employers that said the employees were fired for other reasons. In the example of mozilla, separate from agreeing with the decisions, the actions were known and done for known reasons. No one lied about why they did what they did.
Is it?
I may be misremembering, but my impression was that Eich was pushed out because people interpreted his political donation as being indicative of a larger belief. I don’t recall Eich ever making a statement on the issue.
I’m not defending him here, so please don’t get me wrong. I’m only pointing out that there seems to be some level of inferring someone’s “true beliefs” in both cases. There’s a lot more of it in the article, granted, but it leads me to ask: where is the bar?
What if he still doesn't agree with homosexual marriage? Who are you to force him to change his view?
It's that he had no communication plan for an easily-foreseeable controversy that was disqualifying, not his views specifically.
Hillary Clinton was at one point an opponent of gay marriage:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/hillary-clin...
Edit: Originally had Obama's stated opposition to gay marriage in the 2008 campaign but people keep trying to defend him in particular and that's not the point.
Biden, voted for Defense of Marriage Act:
> https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/26/justice-de...
So did Chuck Schumer and more than a hundred other Democrats, many still in office:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1996/h316
(For the record, Lofgren and Wyden voted Nay.)
They're mostly all going to want to walk it back these days, but did we give Brendan Eich that opportunity? Is it available to everyone? Or should we cancel all of them too?
Here was Obama's position on prop 8: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/obamas-brief-agains...
The Obama admin's opposition and Justices appointed by Obama (and favored by Senate Dems) led the way to marriage equality.
Whether to 'cancel' is an entirely different issue, but I think you're being dishonest here. There was concrete action these Democrats took that defeated terrible discrimination.
>A dignity culture, according to Campbell and Manning, has moral values and behavioral norms that promote the value of every human life, encouraging achievement in its children while teaching that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
>Because victimhood culture is now claimed to confer the highest moral status on victims, Campbell and Manning argue that it “increases the incentive to publicize grievances.” Injured and offended parties who might once have thrown a punch or filed a law suit now appeal for support on social media
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Victimhood_Culture
"O Lord, this zealotry to punish the heretics could easily escape from the control of God's chosen and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform un-Christlike deeds that the Church shall repent of for all eternity!"
"Let's inquisit that heresy when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Truly, monsigneur, this escalation of the Crusade to extirpate the Lutherans could spiral out of our grasp and trigger a continental conflagration that would disturb the harmony of the Catholic Church and cause us to finalize the fracture in Christendom in its entirety!"
"Let us rupture that schism when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"O Puritan Lawyers! I cannot abide this constant seeking of devilry amongst the burghers; for though thy use the Devil chained and cowed, if the Devil escapeth thine chains placyd upon hym, might he wreck also thine own soul's of pleasant Albion forevermore?"
"Let us burn that witch when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Je dis, this never-ending mission to purify France of the Anciens Regime could easily escape the control of the Bourgeosie and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform inhumane deeds against the Third Estate that we will regret in the Eye of Providence for all recorded history!"
"Let's get a-head of that when the time arrives."
SOME TIME LATER
"I say, these attempts to civilize the Savages of the outer colonies could easily escape the oversight of the Provincial Governments and not only jeopardize our economic interests, but enable the performance by Europeans of barbarisms that would surely be worse than the practices of the Savages in the first place!"
"Let us lift the White Man's burden when we reach it."
SOME TIME LATER
"I don't know Comrade, this ten-year-old five-year plan to purify Russia of the Bourgeosie could easily escape control of the Central Committee and not only jeopardize the Revolution, but also cause us to engage in the same Tsarist evils of terror that the Revolution was launched to eliminate!"
"Let's rehabilitate that kulak when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.
Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.
But if even one individual is falsely accused of racism, that's untenable?
Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied. It's unfortunate that while just in the aggregate social pressure is occasionally unjust in the specific, but that's what you get when you deny justice systemically.
This is 100% backwards; structural, institutional problems demand structural, institutional solutions. Want to end structural racism in the U.S.? Start from the clearest near-term goal, viz. reforming criminal justice. Then move on to the next most visible problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...
Stalin was a monster, but history doesn't remember McCarthy and HUAC fondly either.
We don't handle crime by letting people shout "hang him" and following through.
Do we? Because a company firing workers, even their own family, to avoid being seen as racist doesn't exactly scream "acceptance" to me.
In the UK the death penalty was abolished because it is untenable that one innocent is killed accidentally. Innocent until proven guilty (and I might be mistaking the actual thing here) means that it is indeed better for 10 guilty people to walk free than 1 innocent person be imprisoned.
If we reject some of these fundamentals for how we run our societies then we might repeat of the Terror during the French revolution. During the Terror they said "well, the mob cant be controlled, but it generally did good." Political philosophy and History can teach us many things.
I really want Biden to win the 2020 election. But for that to happen, the Democrats will need support from swing voters. When innocent people get fired, this scares and alienates swing voters, and they'll be more likely to vote Republican. I worry that this kind of thing will result in another four years of Trump.
And in the long term, it's not just about swing voters, but also about the 40%+ of the US that consistently votes Republican. We'll never have real equality and peace if 40%+ of the US isn't on board. I truly believe it's possible to change conservatives' minds: polls find widespread support for police reform even among people who identify as Republican [1], and Republican support for gay marriage increased from 16% to 49% over the past few decades [2]. But when innocent people get fired, that's going to make conservatives scared, and they're going to push back by turning out to vote for Trump, and by nominating more extreme candidates in future Republican primaries. So we should fight for racial equality in ways that don't antagonize conservatives any more than necessary. Of course, it's inevitable that fighting for progress will antagonize conservatives to _some_ extent; but we should try to minimize this when we can.
So the real cost of firing innocent people is that it alienates swing voters, and also antagonizes conservatives and hardens their resolve. That's _not_ a small price to pay. We should make a real effort to avoid firing innocent people, and when it does happen, we should express regret instead of doubling down.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...
We can't act now because there's an election coming up. We can't act in January 2021 because red-state Democratic Senators can't spend all their political capital on this one issue. We can't act in July 2021 because we need to focus on COVID and the economy. We can't act in 2022 because an election is coming up. We can't act in 2023 because Republicans regained control of the Senate.
We will never act.
But firing innocent people is not a good way to act! Not now, and not ever. And the costs of firing innocent people are bigger than just "a few people have to find a new job".
When the chips are down, Democrats betray their allies rather than offend bigots.
Cafferty's firing was wrong because his employer shouldn't have the right to fire him like that. But this is a harder position to defend when you're running conservative interference in an ostensibly liberal publication.
That is an excellent point. However, countries which do have political instruments that prevent workers from being disposable are not immune to this either.
This US-centric movement has resonated surprisingly strong in the media and social media in Germany, to the point that there were several protests which broke the rules designed to stem the pandemic. This wasn't by any means unique, as several countries in Western Europe were affected.
There's also a deep conflict running in German society between the left (which consider themselves the good guys) and the right (which are considered basically Nazis by the left). The definition of what it means to be right-wing is predictably expanding to encompass relatively minor gestures, comments or actions and the label of right-wing is then applied to more and more people. It is my impression that it's hard to fire someone for being right-wing though, since the courts have reversed such decisions, but there are social consequences. In general AfD voters are considered right-wing and terrible people. But on the other hand, the AfD enjoyed quite some success in the elections, so what does this tell us about German society?
It seems to me that there's a big disconnect between the media and intellectual elites and the average Joe (or Fritz). Furthermore, a society which is willing to ostracize a significant number of its own for holding specific opinions instead of working through its differences - like many Western European countries or the US wrongly do - is weakening itself. This is one of the paradoxes of this cancel culture: it's doing away with otherwise productive members of society for minor offenses which objectively do not cause harm. It's essentially a form of ideological cleansing.
I think it tells us that the fight against racism and fascism is perpetual, even in countries that otherwise have strong legal frameworks for combating them (as Germany does).
> Furthermore, a society which is willing to ostracize a significant number of its own for holding specific opinions instead of working through its differences - like many Western European countries or the US wrongly do - is weakening itself.
I think the idea of a country "weakening itself" is both a red herring and a dog whistle (although I don't know if you intended the latter). It wasn't very long ago that the US used state power to physically ostracize and divide its citizens by race and religion. That, for whatever reason, isn't considered an act of self-weakening, but (occasionally misdirected) observations on social media about the former are. That, to me, is telling.
The fight against racism is perpetual, fine. There are two camps in that fight, the racists and non-racists. The non-racists have decided to apply the unique strategy of removing people from their camp and adding them to the opposite camp: every time a non-racist says something not correct enough or God forbid even wrong (e.g. on twitter), they are ejected into the other camp. Eventually the other camp's grown from a fringe phenomenon to being noticeably large and everyone laments. In this perpetual fight, the non-racists and non-fascists have chosen a losing plan of action. Maybe they should reconsider instead of digging in their heels.
"It wasn't very long ago that the US used state power to physically ostracize and divide its citizens by race and religion. That, for whatever reason, isn't considered an act of self-weakening, but (occasionally misdirected) observations on social media about the former are. That, to me, is telling. "
I don't know why you think that it wasn't, but obviously it was a huge act of self-weakening and that besides the moral dimension is probably an important reason behind its rectification.