Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

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> It's not an interesting topic to argue about at the bar, it's my fucking life.

You see, the problem is that pretty much every political topic is someone's life. It hardly would be worth discussing otherwise. Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.

Now, I suppose that you are thinking that it is easy for me to say all that stuff about same-sex marriage, because I don't care. And you are kinda right. But let me assure you that there are topics in which I am pretty heavily emotionally invested and have a very strong opinion on (I won't specify what it is to not escalate this even further). And that some people I work with, and even have pretty good friendly relationships with have not only argued against, but outright have hobbies that go directly against to what I think is right. So I'd rather wish some of these hobbies to be banned (or, let's rather say "legally restricted"), and I said that to these people on more than one occasion. We both are fine about that. People cannot agree on everything.

(There is also stuff that is currently banned that I want to be legal. Just to make it more symmetric, so that you don't think it's something about wanting things to be banned that is special.)

> Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.

You can disagree about political issues if you have an alternative position - if I think we should have a robust social safety net and you think we should eliminate welfare because everyone should work, at least you've articulated an alternate position where people can still survive. You can want to privatize the post office and mail still gets delivered. The issue with arguing about people's human rights is that there is no alternative. You're just saying some class of people should have less than others with no remedy

> You see, the problem is that pretty much every political topic is someone's life. It hardly would be worth discussing otherwise. Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.

I'm sorry, but no. Fuck. That.

You listen to multiple people describe to you how a certain political stance directly harms them on a fundamental human level and your response is "I don't care, and you're arrogant to think I should care"? No, fuck that.

It's good that we don't work together because I would absolutely have a problem with that attitude.

Perhaps they wouldn’t mind working with you, even though you might have a problem working with them. For what it’s worth, the point made was not “you’re arrogant to care about an issue that’s important to you”, but “you’re arrogant to think that particular issue is more special than other issues, and you likely hold views that are essentially the same from another viewpoint on another issue”.

>and you likely hold views that are essentially the same from another viewpoint on another issue

Such as? I'm pretty sure I don't oppose anyone's fundamental human rights.

Would you say the same thing about racism? I.e., I should be prepared to work with a racist coworker because I myself probably hold equally despicable views on some other topic.

I would actually say the same thing about pretty much any topic, I think, provided that it passes the test of “if I didn’t know anything about what this person does outside of work, would I think this person was a bad coworker?” I can’t speak for you of course ;)

And it’s hard to come up with something specific to you without really knowing much about you, but I’ll try my hand by randomly picking something which I haven’t made up my mind about yet (so ideally I can be more likely to come up with case for either side) and perhaps you might fall on one side and see how either way you’re infringing on some kind of human right: it’s the “right to be forgotten” topic. On one side, if you let people deleting things about them online, it’s a way to censor discussion about them, you could probably abuse this to get everything negative about you removed, and it would generally lead to an erosion of freedom of speech if people could come after you for what you said and force you to delete it. On the other hand, you have a right to privacy, it’s difficult to consent to sharing once something goes online, there’s already been huge problems with doxxing and people being permanently unemployable because of something that ended up on the Internet about them that was no longer relevant or true and they are haunted by it forever.

I think the issue probably affects fewer people than say racism might, but it’s a clear example of how you could take a viewpoint and have entirely reasonable people claim you are infringing in their rights with your opinion.

I don't follow what you are saying about the right to be forgotten, so I'll skip that part.

It seems to me that you are now defending a logically tenable position: that people who say arbitrarily awful things in public ought to be able to keep their jobs regardless of the extent to which their views are deeply offensive to their coworkers and society at large, and inconsistent with the mission of the company. But if that is where you end up, I take that as a reductio.

> people who say arbitrarily awful things in public ought to be able to keep their jobs regardless of the extent to which their views are deeply offensive to their coworkers and society at large, and inconsistent with the mission of the company

I should note that the donations here were meant to be private, I believe, but were found through some transparency law or the other; not an active public endorsement or anything, especially one officially sanctioned by putting Mozilla clout on it. But yes, to be logically consistent, I am saying that I think you should be able to keep your job even if you grab a loudspeaker the moment you step out of work and proclaim that you think we should drown babies (I am even willing to entertain this if you actually drown babies, though I believe this to be a very unpopular view). I as your coworker will certainly have some very strong opinions about your character, some of which will likely leak into my interactions with you as personal bias, but ideally if you are a normal, well-adjusted person while at work I think you should be able to remain employed.

The issue is not just the donations but the subsequent refusal to make any public statement, which for a CEO effectively constitutes a public statement in itself.

The rest of your comment confirms that you are indeed advocating an extremist position, which I don't think it would be productive to discuss further.

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