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>>This isn’t a partisan issue. “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively,” Gibson and Sutherland report.

From the article. How odd that a partisan issue would occur at the exact same rates on both sides.

I think you're getting downvoted because your post includes a great deal of profanity and comes across as an angry rant. I say this as someone who is generally politically conservative: like all things in life, you've got to pick your battles.

I am actually starting to see a backlash against the politicization of the workplace and think Coinbase got it right, personally. At the end of the day, companies are not college campuses. Trying to turn it into one makes the company uncomfortable, less productive and just... weird. See the recent flare ups at Google, which is hardly a bastion of conservative thought, as an example.

Sorry. Yes. You're right. I had a very raw experience around this very recently, and it was fresh (and painful) on my mind.

I edited my post.

> JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE CONSERVATIVE.

I'd like to think conservative doesn't necessarily come with the persecution complex and lack of coherence on display in your comment. I can think of a few counterexamples.

A few.

You’re bang right about the GP, but you should probably read more conservative thought if you can only think of a few coherent conservatives. (Trump and his boot-lickers are not a good advert for the movement....) The guys at The Dispatch might be a good start, they’re insightful and funny.

I appreciate the tip and will pick it up.

(Mind you, I'm skeptical; in general I find a lot of $POLITICAL_DESIGNATION thought falls short, and `conservative` thought more than average. But there are exceptions and they often turn out to be really illuminating, so I try to keep an eye out.)

>God forbid anyone have an opinion that isn't progressive through and through.

Realize that this cuts both ways. This sentiment, and the various more extreme versions of it, are why I don't typically say things that sound left/liberal in real life.

I was just thinking about this the other day in a happy hour call. People were asking about favorite christmas (crap can I even say christmas?) movies. I actually have one, but then I was thinking, this is an older movie, and who knows, maybe it's now controversial in some way. Were any of the actors caught up in a scandal that should make me now dislike the movie? People may judge that I like a movie with X terrible person. Honestly, I'd rather just not say anything.

>Were any of the actors caught up in a scandal that should make me now dislike the movie? People may judge that I like a movie with X terrible person.

I think that's fundamentally a side-effect of the "regulate decency by voting with your wallet and advocating others do the same" mantra of neoliberalism and libertarianism.

People's attitude towards this has always bugged me - "if you really believed that, you'd put your money where your mouth is", and yet somehow e.g. vegans (no, I'm not vegan) are the butt of jokes instead of held up as people who are morally responsible with their spending.

Like, which is it? It seems to me like people adore the concept, but love to hate on any actual people who meet that concept.

Vegans are the butt of jokes not for their adherence to a clear and consistent moral code but because of their desire to coerce everyone around them to become vegan too.

I have not noticed as much militant veganism in the last few years, perhaps because the people I associate with are older and wiser, or maybe I am just going deaf.

Is this “the gay cabal are grooming our children to be homosexuals” thought train, but against vegans? What’s the point of such broad generalizations/conspiracies?

More like the people who love to tell you they're "child-free" or "don't own a TV/smartphone" (or a thousand pro-gun bumper stickers or open-source laptop stickers or punk rock patches . . .

Virtue signaling is like tryinf to help people see in the dark by shining the flashlight you're carrying in their eyes.

No, this is the “every joke I have heard about vegans deals with their militant evangelism” thought train.

Eg: “if one of your dinner guests is a vegan crossfitter, which do they tell you about first?”

But thank you for your efforts in attempting to mock my argument rather than address it.

Add to this that companies now screen your social media presence. You get turned down for jobs if you say something wrong.

It's no longer safe to have an opinion that's not mainstream.

It's held against you.

There is absolutely no chance in hell I'm going to work at a company who screens my social media presence. I'll freeze to death on the street corner before that.

It's alarmingly much more common than it used to be.

The alarming bit IMO is how many candidates are willing to submit to such a policy. Totalitarianism creeps in incrementally through the weakened will of the individual.

>It's no longer safe to have an opinion that's not mainstream.

If a company is trawling your private opinions on social media, then they're not just opinions, they're public statements. Maybe they ought not to be, but they are.

Of course, your main point stands that companies generally shouldn't hire based on an employee's political opinions (unless it's a PR/representative position or such), outspoken or not, but let's use the correct terminology here:

publicly stating political stuff under your real name is more than just "having an opinion".

> publicly stating political stuff under your real name is more than just "having an opinion".

You're reasoning as if only "political" speech is relevant, but everything can be made "political stuff". Saying the words "master bedroom" is considered racist now. What will be racist tomorrow? No one knows. What is racist today that I don't yet know is racist? What is considered racist by one group if I say it but racist by others if I don't say it (Silence is violence and all that)?

Nobody gets fired for saying master bedroom though. Some things might be considered tactless, other just plain insulting or harmful. It's the latter that gets you in trouble, not of you forget to rename your branch to "main".

You're speaking as if the words are merely considered tactless, but they are being erased from the language for being considered racist, not for being tactless. I don't know if anyone's been fired yet for saying "master bedroom" specifically, but people have been fired for even more innocuous things than that. Like that professor in the UK who was fired for expressing his admiration of the competence of the Jewish people.

Of course anyone can get fired for saying "master bedroom" or absolutely anything else if it's said to be racist. I could agree with your take if the dialogue around those terms was that they were merely harmless. But that is not the dialogue. They are being labeled racist, and being racist naturally implies that they must be stamped out along with the people that say "racist" things. The entire point of labeling things "racist" rather than "tactless" is so that the dogma of the week can be enforced with actual consequences. You can't get a Twitter mob together for someone being tactless, but you can absolutely do it to someone that's "racist".

> Just to be clear… I don't like Trump, and didn't vote for him. Being a conservative does NOT mean you're a Trump fan.

One problem is that the conservatives in national politics or state politics who are not Trump fans have to a large extent gone silent on any issues in which they disagree with Trump, at least publicly, for the last four years. That tends to give people the impression that being a conservative does mean you're a Trump fan.

How can you simultaneously have almost half of the votes to Republicans and a “vast majority” of people not even talking to conservatives?

Progressives will scream in your face, and conservatives are aiming guns at them. Sounds rather expressive.

Sounds like it’s more of a range than black and white. Some conservatives and progressives have always been quiet.

People from both sides of the political divide have lost their job.

Do we need to run the list of political positions that the GOP holds that would hardly be called conservative? Drill baby drill?

Incongruity between rhetoric and behavior is pretty obvious.

Perhaps that the national party you support has kids in cages, suspended Habeus corpus under GW, and is at least in part carrying on about overturning an election plays into the view?

Barr is the one who said whoever wins gets to write the rules. I wonder if politicians are simply using words as a political tool.

You are grossly exaggerating. The leaders of most businesses (executives and CEOs) are conservative, the millions of people are able to get along just fine. The people who are being ostracized are people who say or advocate for awful things. I am guessing based on your intense, ridiculous sensitivity on this issue that is what happened to you.