That might be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.
I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
Those who are politically possessed like to claim that “everything is politics” and that “it’s a privilege to not care about politics”, but every Hispanic and Filipino immigrant I’ve known (which is not a negligible number) care about family, hard work, and stability: not politics.
I'm not sure how anyone can think that being politically active would make your life more stable.
Edit: An example of this is that black people are much less likely to vote than white people. Is this because black people support the status quo while white people want to change things? No, it is because black people don't have the time and energy to spare to vote. And no, this isn't about voting disenfranchisement, black people are less likely to vote even in very blue states.
Stability isn't about dominance, stability is about being uninteresting enough not to get your teeth kicked in.
[1] https://genius.com/Tyler-childers-long-violent-history-lyric...
Your statement that the immigrants you know care about x and y and not politics doesn't actually make sense in response to the concept 'everything is political'. You are responding from the perspective that politics means elections, or some similarly narrow set of topics. But 'everything is political' explicitly rejects that perspective. It means that a Filipino immigrant thinking about whether their uncle and cousins will be able to visit them is political because it's harder for them to get a visa than my English cousins. It means that a Hispanic immigrant talking to her friend in a restaurant after dropping the kids at school should not risk being detained by ICE because speaking Spanish makes some dropkick immigration officer decide they must be illegal immigrants, which happened in Montana.
A whole lot of people in the world are actively indifferent to politics.
Those apolitical people vastly outnumber all the hyper political "your with us or against us" group.
Rubbish - we all know what type of political activism is tearing these companies apart and we all know what political views are the only ones that can be safely expressed.
If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.
Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexism and systematic mistreatment of women was just "normal" but nonetheless political. Of course the people doing the subtle discriminating don't like to think of it as political, because that implies responsibility for action.
First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.
Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.
Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.
The solar flare isn't political obviously, but the response to it is. human disaster usually is the consequence of bad responses to catastrophes which have been declared inevitable. (see the current American covid response). Something that actually is in the realm of politics is shoved into the category of thoughts and prayers.
>Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes
Politicisation isn't bad and the only thing your post is any evidence of is the typical midbrow "no politics or gulag" logic that every conservative American who is afraid of engaging in political conflict has been repeating ad nauseam. You may think you appear smarter if you complain about tribalism every five minutes and act like you're above the fray, but you are not. It's just a silly straw-man made by people who are afraid of political change.
That's not an inconsistency.
> Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
No, of course not.
> No, of course not.
Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
This is a pretty obvious straw man argument.
For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
It is unclear from your comment which employee was fired, unless "former" is intended in the ordinal sense (ie. "first") rather than temporal (ie. "prior"). Can you clarify?
My wife works for a huge social media company that you've definitely heard of, and some of her higher-ups have told her they're worried that the rise of employee activism is going to tear the company's culture apart. I told her she should tell them to follow Coinbase's example.
It's probably for the best.
Taking the package can be seen as a strong stance, not taking it... not really.
Ironically / IMHO, the irritant at the center of the pearl that is many of these ('social justice') issues is people treating other people as a member of an imagined group rather than a specific human they can talk to.
Whether you talk to them (or not) about it doesn't change that - just means you're hiding that part of the process or including them in it.
Definitely not. Unconscious bias is a huge issue in interviewing. Blinding your interviewers to political orientation, or any other factor, is far more effective than telling them just to ignore it.
Altho TBC I do think you're right that blinding is better than attempting to ignore.
I have some on my own resume and I don't mind explaining that here the company was acquired, here we ran out of money, here I had to move to be with family, etc etc.
It's just normal due diligence for a hiring manager.
"Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb;...
Put differently: There is a difference between advocacy and activism, between holding political opinions and being comfortable with them as a central focus of your life, or as a central characteristic that you wish people to see in you.
I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run.
This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
I like capitalism and the free market because I think it's the best system to give most prosperity to a broad spectrum of society. I believe that I take this stance based on compassion but I can assure you that this view is not popular among other people who are in the compassion camp.
No one is asking Coinbase to take a stance and say that the police must be abolished, or that the way forward for Black liberation is X policy. They were simply asking them to acknowledge that racism exists and Black lives do in fact matter.
> Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
As opposed to standing against it, yes. As opposed to "we're just building a juicer, man", no.
Not every group of people "must" take an active stance on every social issue. If they did then they would do nothing but that.
This is why I'm hesitant to invest in Silicon Valley stock at the moment. If this trend continues they'll spend 100% of their time "making a stand", and not innovating or trying to fulfil their stated mission.
I have a responsibility to keep my own house in order. To make sure I'm not racist, homophobic, etc... I don't have a responsibility to spend my life on a cause you select for me, even if that cause is just.
If I were to pick a cause it would be that the central organization for a leading religion is actively harboring and protecting child rapists from international law enforcement. But still I would not, like you, say that every organization that doesn't march under that banner are "wrong about" that.
Companies are not "supporting status quo of child rapists" if they don't put up banners on their website. They're just not. That's nonsense.
You can't condemn me for not marching with you. That's fascism.
I will disagree somewhat with the people who say that companies never have a place for political stuff. If you are any company involved in South Africa during apartheid you should choose a side on apartheid and voice that position.
If BLM means just the simple definition of what the words imply (that black lives matter), there's no point in saying it. Because there's literally no one on the other side. I suspect that's not what it means, because saying a broader statement "All Lives Matter" seems to be considered a kind of slur.
So "Black Lives Matter" means something deeper. More like "Black people are killed indiscriminately by police in this country. The cops get away with it, and it's a huge problem." That is full of assumptions and political beliefs that reasonable people can disagree about. And I don't see why every company should take a side on that issue.
Child pornography, from what I can tell, is not a controversial issue. Most companies haven't made statements about their views on murder, theft, and slavery either. But if the nation were prominently split over whether murder, theft, slavery, or child pornography are good things, I would hope some companies would make a statement.
It is, however, prominently split over whether the specific, contentious version of "anti-racism" though promulgated by the likes of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo - "Critical Race Theory", to call it by its academic name - is the One True Anti-Racism that it claims to be, or whether it's counterproductive, divisive, anti-liberal and on track to set race relations back by decades.
Companies have as much moral obligation to state support for CRT as they do to state their support for Trotskyism or Randian Objectivism.
If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.