Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

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There’s a lot of things that aren’t political per-se you shouldn’t share with the broader group.

For instance, maybe my family has a history of killing wild animals for food. I wouldn’t share our kill shots with my company the same way I would with friends that are interested in hunting. Because I know it’s something a good chunk of people don’t want to see and it’s unnecessary to share.

Now imagine I had a few friends in the office who too supported this. And we went out of our way to not only share pictures of these killings (which are all legal) but started to intimidate people that didn’t like to see them.

And then we go a step further and plan a trip to Africa to hunt lions - all legal and on the up and up. And we share these relentlessly. And we don’t stop there. We post Big-5 trophies and endless shots of venison being butchered.

We also begin to loudly advocate NRA membership for colleagues and use company resources to recruit social events where we all go shooting together. We go further and decide we want THE COMPANY to support our gun rights. We walk out and protest our CEO who “doesn’t have the balls” to take a measly pheasant.

Who wants this?

> And we went out of our way to not only share pictures of these killings (which are all legal) but started to intimidate people that didn’t like to see them.

And your managements only way of reacting to that is banning all potentially political talk? Really? My boss would go "go make a #hunting channel and keep it there". And I presume if I tried to get him into gun rights activism the response would be "no, stop pestering us about it", repeated more firmly and with consequences if I kept it up.

This entire article and thread and Twitter are people complaining that the boss just said “no stop pestering us about it”.

You made my point?

If you don't see a difference between "don't talk about any political topics" and "stop pushing for the company to do something about your pet topic X", then yes, that is your point. But given you recognized a difference between "talking about your hunting" and "pushing for the company to support the NRA", I doubt that is the case.

The fable was about the slippery slope or w/e. Maybe not a Pynchon-esque metaphor here, but I’m not a writer.

But why is it different to pressure a company into publicly supporting 2a? It’s literally a right as sacred as speech or voting.

Why does that seem weird but other things not?

My point is that I don't think it's effective to respond to every "slippery slope" by not letting people anywhere near the slope and holding them back from talking about things they care about because they touch the slope. But rather to pick your point on each slope, which gives your people more opportunity to be open and,if it involves company policy etc, for you to get feedback - although the final decision about what the company does of course still rests with you. And if a topic just doesn't work, ban that.

Re the specific example: I'm not from the US, so a fundamental right to guns (or even just much in the way of gun culture) is culturally "weird" here. I didn't intend to suggest that this would be weird/off-limits to all companies everywhere. Which is kind of the point again: find what works for the topic for your people.

as per this company there would be no hunting or gun channel in the work slack because "politics"

Sounds great, to be honest.

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