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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

My last company was trending in a similar direction. They would allow one ideological group to post completely unsubstantiated political claims, but opposing views were not allowed to be presented at all, even if they were thoroughly researched (this wasn't "official" policy, of course). Note that while I'm not a lawyer, I suspect that these permitted ideological viewpoints were sufficiently sexist and racist as to open the company up to some legal liability.

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Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one of activists complained about being (accidentally) mis-gendered by a new employee. In another meeting, a different activist complained about an employee apologizing for mis-gendering them. Apparently this made the activist feel awkward, so they'd have preferred no apology at all. It was at this point I realized there is no reasoning with activists such as these. Their demands weren't coherent. They were just a bunch of people complaining about hurt feelings. These meetings must have cost the company millions of dollars and huge amounts of lost development time. And they certainly didn't resolve anything.

I and a lot of my colleagues just want to do our work without being forced to participate in regular struggle sessions.

Everyone who is interested in the current wave of hyper-politicization should learn about struggle sessions. These originated in Maoist China and were a bullying tactic used by red guards to humiliate anyone who had any opposition to the radical ideology being imposed at that time.

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

An acquaintance of mine worked for a company that stocked tampons in the men’s restroom because someone lobbied for it despite the company having no female->male trans employees. My acquaintance, who is male->female trans, was baffled.

Doesn’t that just mean providing equal facilities? If you put hand sanitizer in one bathroom, you should try to provide it in all of them.

A separation here is that these facilities are inherently unequal due to the existence of gendered signs declaring one restroom "Men" and the other "Women". In this existing framework, it doesn't make as much sense to go to the expense of stocking an item 99.99..% of users won't use.

Instead, the signs could be changed to simply state "Restroom". Sure, one might have urinals and the other a tampon dispenser, but anyone can use either and everyone could agree to be adults about it.

Should we test men for ovarian cancer to provide equal medical services?

The fact that these activists were being unreasonable does not mean they cannot be reasoned with.

I imagine transitioning is a very emotional and vulnerable thing to happen. Hence it being awkward that someone apologized for misgendering isn't unreasonable at all. Advocating that no-one should even do that would be unreasonable. But just presenting "this happened, this is how it made me feel" is a very natural thing.

From such a presentation general rules cannot always be derived. That is not the point of such a presentation. The point is for someone who is having feelings to have those feelings heard and recognized. Maybe that can lead to a bit more understanding for people who were never in such situations.

It seems like a waste of time to make these meetings all-hands company wide. But don't dismiss these activists just because they pushed for an all hands meeting. It wasn't a good thing to push for, but people get things wrong sometimes. Having been wrong is not the same as always being wrong.

My gut feeling is that allowing this at a workplace is a (rather perverse) variation of the "employee of the month" nonsense. I.e. instead of rewarding your subordinates monetarily, you give them a power to bully their peers, but not to compete with yourself.

It is also useful in pushing out "troublemakers". People that will not call BS on the unsubstantiated political claims are also less likely to call out corruption/nepotism/inefficiency of the middle management.

In the long term the company will stagnate and die, but we live in such a wonderful time of government bailouts, low interest rates and desperate investors, so it may take a long time to unravel.

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