Tripwire CEO 'Steps Down' After Supporting Texas Anti-Abortion Law
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Public figures can and regularly do get shit canned for what they say. That's an integral part of the job.
I love eating meat, I don't see it as murder but I would never agree to cancel someone because he decides to speak out his mind that meat is murder.
There are relatively few vegetarians and vegans, so they aren't a real threat. I doubt you know what you would do if the number of vegetarians and vegans in your country were the same as the number of anti-abortion theocrats and the former were actively pursuing a long-term goal of establishing legally that all animals have personhood.
CEOs are allowed to publicly state their opinion if it is in favor of left leaning positions but not conservative leaning positions.
See also the book Woke Inc.
This is not a principle that the people who got this CEO actually live by or genuinely believe in. It's a post-hoc excuse for collecting a scalp from the other side. Let's speak plainly about what's really going on here.
It's only CEOs who go against the left who actually get fired.
What would you like—for everyone to be forced into buying his company’s products/services? Cancel the right to (not) associate? Cancel free speech, so no one can spread news about his opinion?
Foolish. Everything worked exactly as it is meant to work: freedom of speech and freedom of association, hand in hand.
No. CEOs of companies that sell to left-leaning consumers can make left-leaning posts. The same goes for the right. This has always been true.
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/03/11/nfl-revenue...
Regardless I fail to see how this refutes the claim that the right also attempts to engage in "canceling" of those they disagree with but is less effective at it.
For specific examples see the backlash to Gilettes 2019 commercial, or the attempted boycott of nike following their release of ads featuring Kaepernick.
http://inlandnwreport.com/2021/04/08/here-is-your-boycott-li...
Numerous others
https://www.cancelthiscompany.com/index.html
https://www.cancelthiscompany.com/Company-Reviews/Sonic_Revi...
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b...
University of California President Clark Kerr: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fbis-vendetta-against-...
Nikole Hannah-Jones: https://www.wral.com/faculty-say-hannah-jones-tenure-saga-ta...
James Whitfield: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/us/texas-principal-paid-leave...
Strong arguments for: Dan Rather, Sarah Jeong (attempted), Quinn Norton (succeeded), Al Franken, Emily Wilder, Noah Adams, Bob Edwards, Daniel Schorr.
(So many in the press. Interesting.)
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens.
The Hollywood Blacklist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
Note that business itself tends to be dominated by conservatives, with some exceptions.
Quinn Norton was fired for anti-black, anti-gay, and “Friends with Nazis” comments. If you want to associate this with a political side at all in the USA, then (especially the anti-gay language) it would be right-wing. https://www.wired.com/story/the-ny-times-fires-tech-writer-q...
Al Franken wasn’t fired at all, he resigned from his job as senator after being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.
Continuing along your example list seems pointless since examination of the first few suggests it’s rather a jumble of names. How is such a list of academics, journalists, and a US Senator relative to the parent’s original question of “ When was the last time that a CEO got canceled by right-leaning consumers for making a left-leaning post?” A CEO position seems quite different from the ones you listed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#...
And not just any fraudulent documents, but ones that had typography that was so anachronistic that amateur bloggers were able to discover and prove their fraudulence.
CBS appointed a panel led by Republican Dick Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania and United States Attorney General under George H. W. Bush, and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer and former executive editor of the Associated Press. Released in January 5, 2005, their report concluded that CBS rushed to make inadequately verified allegations public and it was slow in responding to criticism. The panel, however, was unable to conclude whether the documents were forgeries or not, nor did it conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content. Like the story itself, the report and its conclusions were divisive....
Rather has stood by the story. In a 2007 interview with Larry King, Rather argued that the review panel was “a set-up,” and pointed to the fact that “nobody to this day has proved these documents were fraudulent. . . . The story was true.” The journalist also talked about the story in his 2012 memoir, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News, and claimed that internal CBS documents that came to light during his lawsuit show how Viacom lobbyist Carol Melton, under pressure from GOP House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, urged Heyward to retract the Bush/TexANG story. In Rather's words, Melton "made it clear that Blunt was speaking for an even more powerful constituency—the White House.” Rather was especially critical of Leslie Moonves, who was then chairman and CEO of CBS, explaining that CBS should not have retracted the story "but that was the way that Blunt and the White House wanted it, and Moonves chose to oblige." His 2012 memoir led a new wave of articles that revisited the 60 Minutes II piece. Most of them, like the extensive Texas Monthly article in 2012, concluded that the story was and remained far more complex than expected.
https://danratherjournalist.org/about-dan/controversies
Note that Rather's "controversies" page shows he has been attacked by conservatives and the GOP since the Nixon administration in 1972. It's also quite candid on the controversies with which he's been involved. I'd be interested in similar personally-hosted pages from other persuasions.
Moreover, the question was "When was the last time that a CEO got canceled" by the right. I think I've demonstrated and documented that that particular practice is in fact very well established.
> Moreover, the question was "When was the last time that a CEO got canceled" by the right. I think I've demonstrated and documented that that particular practice is in fact very well established.
By listing random non-CEOs who were fired or resigned for reasons like sexual harassment or anti-gay comments? I don’t get how you say that establishes anything related to the quoted question.
If you are on the left, it's great.
If you're on the right, you just lost your right to have free speech and stay employed.
It's not just CEOs. An everyday engineer can be fired for publicly repeating political opinions on the right. See Damore. But no one who repeats public opinions on the left gets fired.
Actually you'd probably get fired most places for publishing a company wide memo of any kind with the primary purpose of criticizing your bosses and workplace.
That's apples and oranges. Conservatives can boycott all they want, but they don't have the same cultural power to get people fired for ideological transgressions like this. I read somewhere that while conservatives have been very effective at achieving and maintaining political power, it turns out that's not a substitute for cultural power, so their strategy ultimately failed.
Ultimately, they can probably blame their allegiance to free market capitalism for that weakness. It seems that, when conservatives actually achieve economic power, making money takes priority over their other ideological commitments.
Conservatives have been quite successful in the past.
Any failure is not for lack of trying.
The hypocrisy is flagrant.
Stop with the nonsense. A CEO was fired. Nobody was cancelled.
> Most companies sell to both left-leaning and right-leaning consumers, but people only seem to get canceled over right-leaning posts.
Elon Musk smoked a single joint and his board did an executive reorg. Most CEOs keep their politics mostly private. What are you even saying?
What would the answer be if you replaced "canceled" with "fired" in my comment then?
> Elon Musk smoked a single joint and his board did an executive reorg.
But isn't he still the CEO?
The same. I wanted to correct the nonsense language. You'll note I used appropriate language in my response.
> But isn't he still the CEO?
If he had been CEO for 6 weeks and did an unremarkable job, he certainly would've been. Given the fact that he made them a boatload of money, obviously they wouldn't fire him. If John Gibson had done anything of value and driven them to record breaking sales, they'd probably have kept him too.
(I am French, we do not care what our CEOs say about non business things as personal beliefs, or with whom they sleep, or which church they attend our not - so this is just a genuine comment on one possibility)
We need to stop letting this radical religious agenda be whitewashed as conservatism. It's born out of frustration with conservatism, but it is anything but conservative.
That's a specious argument, since at its core you're just picking an arbitrary reference point that gets you the result you want.
Also I don't think that "conservatism," properly understood, is about arbitrarily "conserving" everything.
To me, the core of conservatism involves respecting existing institutions and customs, and wanting change to happen slowly. This has direct bearing on the topic, because it's incorrect to say this CEO had to step down due to having a "conservative" opinion. Rather, business is intrinsically conservative. It's just that our societal values in 2021 involve things that religious fundamentalists do not like, such as women's healthcare and rainbow flags. Big business isn't embracing these symbols so they can be activists pushing change, but rather to ingratiate their businesses with consumers by embracing change that has already happened.
This CEO didn't have to step down because they were against some change or wanted to slow it down, but rather because they were advocating for a change that most people find repulsive. There would be similar pushback for any political opinion that was equally unpopular.
To you, but your definition is 1) mostly theoretical, 2) co-opts a label that applies to a real things that are different, and 3) appears to be a kind of "exo-definition" (e.g. applied from outside).
IMHO, the "conservatism" you define doesn't have any real political life to it in America, and it never has. You might have something closer to real life if your "core" included recovering "institutions and customs" that had value but were lost, but that would still probably be lacking.
> but rather because they were advocating for a change that most people find repulsive.
Honestly, that sounds like a view from a bubble.
He can, and did, voice his opinion on social media. He was not prevented from doing so in any way. Other people read his opinion and decided they didn't want to work with him anymore. Also their right.
Because enough customers and partners decided they didn't want to work with him anymore, he felt like the only way to save his business was to step down.
> Should this very large group of people not be employable because of this opinion
It's not just an opinion, but legislation that puts millions of women at risk. If you support things that are harmful to women, I don't see why I'd employ you. :shrug:
For what it's worth, this is what conservatives have been pushing for decades, the ability to discriminate based on skin color, sexual orientation, and political beliefs. I am all for giving them their wishes on this one.
Based on his statement, my response is that I do not want to conduct any sort of business with his company. That's not a major hardship to me (I didn't like Killing Floor), and it's not a major hardship to them. However, there are more people who feel like I do, and apparently some of them WORK at Tripwire. If I was in their position, I would have quit. Perhaps the company leadership didn't want that to happen?
In short: who here has misbehaved to your mind? I am not legally required to financially support people who wish harm on me, am I? And let's be clear, people are already being harmed by this law -- this is not a mere disagreement on the finer points of jurisprudence.
It doesn't sound like such a bad idea until it's applied to people/businesses with your beliefs.
1. This is not a mainstream political belief. The law at the root of the current issue in Texas is far beyond the mainstream. The intention at some level is to shift the Overton window of what is mainstream in its favor, but that has not occurred yet.
2. It's not my responsibility to educate this guy to my point of view. I don't know him and I don't work with him. Actually the only thing I know about him is that he doesn't respect the rights of others that I feel are important, so I'm doubly disinclined to make his acquaintance. I would presume that some amount of discourse did occur within Tripwire, but I don't think we know.
3. I'm allowed to vote with my dollars. It doesn't have to be a glorious public crusade, and it may not make the slightest bit of difference. In this case, it certainly won't. But those dollars work for me, and I can choose to deploy them so as not to (tacitly or actively) support people or business who wish to harm myself and people who I identify with. That's what I have chosen to do, and others should make their own choices.
4. In a different scenario, I might indeed feel differently. I don't find that the slippery slope is a solid argument for why I can't take (lawful) action to preserve my values though.
The law as written goes far beyond a mainstream political belief. There is no civil reward for turning in or reporting or suing a child rapist, serial rapist, a pedophile, a child abuser or a cannibal or a serial killer, much less someone that assisted them. None of these are legal activities in any state or country.
But you can report someone helping someone else get an abortion and you get a minimum of $10K? That's a full degree of separation from an abortion and is an indirect 'crime'. Is that 'crime' somehow way worse than all the direct heinous crimes that I listed that we have to allow civil litigation? Abortion is legal in large parts of the world. What about women who get unfairly sued? How do you prove you did not have an abortion? Who's going to pay for the lawyers to defend them? Is there a precedent for this apart from autocratic regimes where people are supposed to watch others?
I'm not defending the law, but it seems it's written like that only because the Texas legislature has been prevented from legislating directly to address what they see as a legitimate issue, unlike in the other areas you listed. The law's structure is a kludge to get around that limitation.
You'd probably see similar kludges if the Supreme Court set similar permissive precedents in the areas you listed or areas of polarized moral sentiment (e.g. gay conversion therapy).
Yes, in your (and my) opinion. And in his opinion, it's a necessary measure to protect innocent life. That makes him (probably) wrong, not evil.
Based on his statement, my response is that I do not want to conduct any sort of business with his company.
You are free to make those sorts of decisions, but it's an impractical way to go through life and it leads to the increased polarization of society. It's very likely that you have some political, moral, and/or religious views that your employers or customers would find deeply wrong and harmful. Should they cease doing business with you on that basis?
I don't believe that "voting with my wallet" is impractical. Taken to extremes, it does indeed cause polarization but I also think that it can cause real change in the world -- because it's capitalism, you know? Certainly the cost to me depends on how far I take it, but as I said in this case the hardship is minimal.
As a general rule, I don't make my personal views known at work or on social media. This comment thread is maybe the only time I have ever blurred that line. If someone were to find it and disagree so vehemently, then I suppose they are entitled to take the (legal) course of action they deem fit. I stand behind my words.
Women have the right to terminate the potential life of a child, on the principle that it's their body so their choice.
Men have no opt-out to 18 years of child support even if the child was conceived due to deception, etc. Somehow the 18 years of work, and the effects of that work on their body, do not count under the principle of their body, their choice.
I would say there is already not gender equality on this issue. The principle that is the foundation of abortion rights (in other states than Texas anyway) is not being applied consistently.
I don’t think you’ll find many pro-choice people that disagree with you on that. But that unfairness doesn’t make it right to force a person to go through 9 months of pregnancy and labor.
What solution do you propose for the situation you cited?
If I get a girl pregnant, what equality is there in choosing to abort? None. I have no say. My only choice is pay support if she keeps it or go to jail.
The above being said, banning abortion doesn’t improve equality over the current situation.
Folk like this are precisely how Mozilla ended up replacing Eich with a parasitic CEO who immediately proceeded to destroy the business. Society's strength lies in managing and celebrating differences, not myopic, totalitarian uniformity. Folk like this are far worse for society than any temporary (and likely unenforceable) regulation, in one conservative region of an increasingly backwater nation trapped in what appears to be a permanent state of civil decay.
He did.
So did other people, so everyone’s rights were well-maintained. They also made purchasing decisions. Would you deny them the right to choose a different service provider?
You can't air opinions like this unless you're happy to only work with and sell to people who think the same.
I'd assume that many of them would be uncomfortable with the Texas law on a rule of law basis; it's divisive on two axes. Even many of those who approve of the ends would be very uncomfortable with the means.
It strikes me that this offers a way out of the abortion conundrum, those who oppose abortion can offer their bodies as hosts for the precious foetus, women who do not wish to get their way too.
This could also involve men opposed to abortion; they would need to be castrated and have large oestrogen injections to create the right chemical environment, but a small price to pay, surely.
Is there some social more I missed that says forcing 13 year old rape victims to carry children to term is acceptable behavior but not buy videogames from the shitheads who support this policy crosses a line?
Why should I support people who are trying to push their religious beliefs on me? Why should I support people who want to regulate what others can do with their own body?
According to Governor Abbott, this won't be a problem because "Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets" [1].
[1] https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/gov-abbott-abortion-bill-won...
But imagine you enter a Twilight Zone episode, and are transferred back to the 1920s.
You publicly state your opinion that abortions should be legal, and then you lose your job because of it.
How would that feel to you?
Even though I think a woman's rights are the most important, I understand that there are lots of people from 1920, or even today who think the unborn baby's rights are the most important.
In fact from their point of view, they think people who support abortion are baby killers. That's not right. You and me aren't baby killers. We want to help women. That's all.
I don't think people with this other opinion are monsters. They're people. Like you and me. Just people with other opinions. They just want to help unborn babies. That's all.
He can. He did.
> 39% of Americans believe abortion should be illegal in all/most cases.
Many people who believe that don’t support the Texas law; the people that oppose abortion actually overlap a lot with the people that think that open floodgates for private civil litigation by parties not directly involved in an issue is a very bad way to enforce even good and necessary laws.
> Should this very large group of people not be employable because of this opinion?
People who can’t restrain their public engagement on controversial issues to positions that the relevant decisionmakers are willing to tie the organization to tend not to be employable in positions where they are perceived as the face of an organization. Having a belief is not the issue.
Public opinion on the left - OK.
Public opinion on the right - You're fired.
You are not free to speak from consequences from other people.
Everyone else is free to decide that they think you're an asshole that they don't want to work for.
That is what actual FREEDOM looks like.
People love to advocate for "freedom" when it agrees with their interests, and advocate for "accepting the consequences of your actions" when they disagree with something. Actual apolitical freedom means having a single standard to apply.
Views on abortion have been mostly static since 1975 in the US population as a whole. ~30% “legal under any”, ~50% “legal only under certain”, ~20% “illegal in all”.
It’s interesting, but unsurprising, to see that publicly speaking in favor of a 70% popular opinion would lead to issues in tech related industries such as gaming. Due to various factors like education polarization, only speaking out in favor of the 30% “Legal under any circumstances” view would be seen as acceptable in the industry.
Fair to point out that the Texas heartbeat law seems like it could have an effect similar to the 20% view (although it and the Supreme Court decision that the developer praised doesn’t apply to RU-486 abortions, which Texas is currently attempting to ban separately[1]. Therefore, even in Texas law, abortion remains legal under some circumstances for now.)
[1] https://19thnews.org/2021/09/texas-restrictions-abortion-ind...
Currently under Texas law/lack of a stay by SCOTUS which was praised by the CEO, as I mentioned in the previous post, medication abortion via RU-486 would still be available for a woman in this circumstance, although Texas is working to ban it too - this was not discussed in the tweet at issue.
You’re absolutely right about the poll numbers generally being in favor of those 2 exceptions.
> Was this intended for me? I don't know almost anything about any sports controversies. I do my best to not follow sports news. I find it mostly boring. But I do support people fighting against oppression, especially when it comes with physical abuse by those in power.
That isn't a sports controversy. If you care about "fighting against oppression" how did you not get the reference? A link was provided to explain what you're apparently unaware of.
tl;dr: the authoritarian PRC government uses the exact same tactics you are approving of to stifle criticism and opposition to its oppression. You might feel differently about those tactics if the context was this guy getting fired for saying it's wrong of the PRC to ship Muslims in Xinjiang off to reeducation camps to crush their culture.
Did this guy lose the company a measurable amount of money?
Given that this law is like a week old and how little attention customers pay to CEO twitter, I'm almost certain that's a no.
Would he have lost them money? Yes, definitely, without question.
So would it be right to fire Kaepernick at the first hint of controversy, since it would be reasonable to predict that would cause at least some loss of revenue?
Yeah, an NFL quarterback has much higher profile. Given how well known quarterbacks are to the public, statements they make (especially on TV during games) have much higher impact than a tweet from some no-name CEO.
I think the focus on revenue, etc. have an element of bad faith to them. The real metric seems to be you agree with A and disagree with B, so it's wrong to punish A and fine to punish B. What to choose as a publicly offered "critical metric" can usually be gerrymandered to get whatever result one desires.
Personally, I don't think anyone should be fired for expressing an opinion, especially not one that's well within the Overton Window of the country as a whole. To do otherwise invites polarization and extremism.
Hilarious. I'll stop communicating as it's clear you're only communicating in bad faith.
> Hilarious. I'll stop communicating as it's clear you're only communicating in bad faith.
My statement is objectively true. Grab someone on the street, and ask them which of these names they recognize: Colin Kaepernick (QB) or Jed York (CEO)? They're going to recognize the guy they actually watch on TV.
We can even get pseudo-quantitative with this:
https://twitter.com/jimmyg_10 (one of three current starting quarterbacks for the 49ers, apparently got the job last season): 234.1K Followers
https://twitter.com/jedyork (apparently CEO of the 49ers since 2008): 128.6K Followers
Sure. It's also not relevant. You asked a question that made no sense. The appropriate question would've been "Who has more impact on company earnings, a quarterback or a CEO", in that we're discussing one's ability to impact revenue for a business. It has nothing to do with celebrity.
You're welcome to quantify whatever you like. How blue is sky blue? Ultimately it doesn't matter. A CEO has far more ability to damage the company they work than a quarterback. This is why your behavior is in bad faith. You're arguing points nobody made/don't change the outcome of what we're discussing.
Except that it is.
> You asked a question that made no sense. The appropriate question would've been "Who has more impact on company earnings, a quarterback or a CEO", in that we're discussing one's ability to drive revenue for a business. It has nothing to do with celebrity.
No. For one, you're wondering off into the weeds. We've gotten sidetracked discussing the effects of a particular type of action (stating a personal opinion publicly) on revenue, not the effects of all actions theoretically available to the role. The CEO can certainly have "more impact on company earnings," but that's because they could do things like badly misallocate investment, which are not relevant to a discussion about personal political statements.
The amount of "celebrity" someone has directly effects how much attention their statements will get, and thus the impact of those statements.
> A CEO has far more ability to damage the company they work than a quarterback. This is why your behavior is in bad faith. You're arguing points nobody made/don't change the outcome of what we're discussing.
Eh, no. Way up here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440465), someone drew an equivalence between Colin Kaepernick and this CEO, which sets up an uncomfortable dilemma for certain common clusters of political tendencies (i.e. it was right to fire Kaepernick). That dilemma was "solved" by gerrymandering criteria to differentiate their positions in a way that doesn't actually make much sense (e.g. somehow this CEO's controversial opinions can be predicted to negatively affect revenue, while Kaepernick's much higher profile statements could not have). Showing that "solution" doesn't make sense because it doesn't match the facts restores the dilemma.
My ultimate position is that both this CEO and Kaepernick should have both kept their jobs, in spite of the political opinions they expressed. I suspect that any set of seemingly politically neutral criteria that justifies the CEO being fired but not Kaepernick likely was engineered to justify a result that was really determined by underlying political biases (e.g. applying a factional Overton window to the broader population).
Or behave in a way in which nobody would purchase their products, which their role as CEO defines as one of their highest priorities.
Quarterbacks play football well.
Are you seeing how this is a silly comparison?
I'll try this one last time.
Quarterbacks aren't anonymous guys who throw a ball around. They're celebrities with a direct connection to the brand of the team they play for, and fans are familiar with whatever they do during a game. If they get involved in some controversy, it affects that brand.
It's a certainty that a greater proportion of football customers (fans) watch games than game studio customers subscribe to CEO tweets or attend to something that will bring them to their attention. That's because watching football games is more integral to being a football customer than paying attention to twitter is to pretty much anything.
Also, IIRC Kaepernick was booed on many occasions during his protests.
If a CEO's controversial personal political tweets can affect revenue to the point he should be fired, a QB's in-game controversial political statements can too.
> Quarterbacks aren't anonymous guys who throw a ball around. They're celebrities with a direct connection to the brand of the team they play for, and fans are familiar with whatever they do during a game. If they get involved in some controversy, it affects that brand.
Quarterbacks are employed to play football. CEOs are employed to run companies. If you can't see this, you're either intentionally being obtuse or aren't capable of having this type of conversation.
> If a CEO's controversial personal political tweets can affect revenue to the point he should be fired, a QB's in-game controversial political statements can too.
I'm not sure what point you're making. He was fired. He was actually cancelled, in that the people that disagreed with him prevented him from ever getting future work, which is unlike the Tripwire CEO, who will land somewhere else just fine. Employers are within their rights to fire whoever they want. The difference is, again, the purpose for which that employee was employed in the first place. Firing your plumber because of their facebook posts may be unnecessary. Firing a spokesman for damaging your brand is not.
Again, if you can't see this, you're either intentionally being obtuse or aren't capable of having this type of conversation. Either way this'll be the last exchange we have on this topic. Have an excellent day.
I question it. You’re too confident here. How much money would he lose? Is it measurable? A blip?
And how much increased revenue would be gained by his supporters? Does it even out?
How many people doing the canceling have never bought from the company, nor would ever?
No one was cancelled.
> I question it. You’re too confident here. How much money would he lose? Is it measurable? A blip?
Do you think he would've been fired if his superiors thought otherwise?
One of the characteristics of a good CEO is their judgment of risk.
That includes their ability to avoid controversy for their organization, and put the organization's message above their own.
He knew this tweet might have the risk of financial impact to the company he was specifically and volunatrily selected to protect (among other things) its financial health, and if he had ran it by the board they absolutely would have told him not to post it.
The poor judgment on display here is the core issue.
I can get behind that =)
edit to make substantive
I don't think we should be firing people for their beliefs, at what point are out jobs separated from our personal lives. Having said that, if you say something as CEO you take what you get, like Elon should have.
I'm sure each and every one of us has done things that if captured on camera, or were we CEO and posted it to Twitter as opposed to speaking it, would have gotten us fired.
Or we need to get rid of the bullshit and just have political businesses, where left leaning people work for left leaning companies, etc.
Mozilla took similar action with respect to Brendan Eich. You can judge how well that worked for them.
Second, you don't have to explicitly "forecast" sales impact to understand there might be an impact, and that that impact is guaranteed to be negative. (Again - CEOs are paid to be good at exactly these sorts of judgment calls.)
Throwing out tweets on a hot button political topic as the CEO of a games company is, at best, a high-risk, low-reward branding strategy.
Look: nobody should ever lose his job for voicing political opinions in his capacity as a private human being --- and yes, this principle applies to political opinions you or I don't like. What's going on right now is no different from 1950s blacklisting except that the sides are flipped. If you object to McCarthyism and don't object to this, then you're just a partisan unmoored to any principle of discourse higher than getting your team to win at any cost. You can be that way if you want, but you should at least be honest with yourself about it.
I think there's a set of political statements that you believe should not result in firing no matter the financial consequences. That makes you a hypocrite, but that's okay: everyone is a hypocrite these days.
These days, every conversation is about scoring points for a side, not agreeing on universal principles everyone can agree to live under. On Monday, someone will espouse principle X if it hurts someone on the other team, and then on Tuesday say X doesn't apply to someone on his side. Yeah, okay.
The bottom line is this: if normal participation in the political process costs you your job, then you're not living in a free country, and I don't really care about the pretzel logic people use to justify creating our current atmosphere of terror. Either you can speak or you can't.
Your qualm is with cultural intolerance for conservative ideas. Which I agree is valid. But yeah, sorry, if you’re running a business and can’t understand that your business partners will be potentially offended by your own political statements, you deserve to get fired. Let’s not pretend this was some no-name engineer at a tech company in SV who got canned because they expressed a normal political opinion and their coworkers “just didn’t like it”. He’s the CEO and is the ultimate ambassador of the company and has a responsibility to read the room. Would you expect BMW or Mercedes to keep their CEOs if they made political statements about the human rights abuses and economic sabotage conducted by China? Let’s be real.
Do I sympathize with him that he freely spoke his mind and was inherently punished for it? Yes, in principle. But he’s a complete idiot for thinking he can do so without consequences in his position. There are always going to be cultural factors intwined in economics and sometimes they are not fair, but that’s the way the world has always worked.
> Let’s not pretend this was some no-name engineer at a tech company in SV who got canned because they expressed a normal political opinion and their coworkers “just didn’t like it”.
That happens all the time. You just usually don't hear about it on the news. A lot of people also keep their mouths shut, both inside and outside work, because they know that they're surrounded by people chomping at the bit to get someone fired for having the wrong opinions. After the Eich affair, lots of people adopted a policy of no public donations for anything whatsoever.
This is not normal and it's not healthy.
- a women’s wellness lifestyle brand
- a healthy meal delivery service
- a government IT contractor
- a pickup truck accessories manufacturer
- a gun manufacturer
- a Christian publisher
Draw the line for me when you think he would not be cancelled. See the point, here? Context is everything. This is the opposite of McCarthyism.
Third rails are hot, live, and tremendously unforgiving to careless or unskilled handling.
But anyway, isn't that supposed to just affect politicians?
There were two mistakes made here, but the mistake that chills speech and punishes dissent, without limit, is, in the long run, far worse for our society.
We can't keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Even racists, misogynists and bigots have valuable things to contribute to society. Heck, approx 99% of humans living are bigoted and have "wrong views"; if you take human history, it's 100%.
The people who are against gay marriage, and abortion, aren't taking those positions to be horrible people. They have heartfelt, if ignorant, reasons for it. I don't think we're doing anyone any good by taking people's livelihood away for sharing their personal political or religious beliefs.
Probably gonna get downvoted. But that's okay. It's not my livelihood.
"We" didn't do anything. The corporate board (I assume) made this decision, not us. The guy isn't facing charges, he's just been let go by a private LLC for saying something publicly that was perceived as reflecting negatively on the business.
Like I said below, in effect corporate America has decided that taking left-leaning stances in the political arena is where their best chances of being and remaining profitable are. Sure, there are exceptions. I don't expect the NRA to become 'woke' as many conservatives would describe it. But a gaming studio? Their largely youth demographic would most likely be divided by this. That's bad business and it's unsurprising that he was terminated.
About the only thing I find shocking regarding this whole situation is that this idiot posted his views in a public forum knowing full well his voice would be tied to the company he was working for given he was CEO. Have bad takes, fine. But when you start putting pen to paper in a public forum you need to understand that your words could be used against you. Public relations 101, it's as simple as that.
Is it a pleasant way to live? No. Is it solely the fault of “the left”? No, it’s the way of everything now.
So do non racists, non misogynists and non bigots. Since I can only consume so much content I may as well spend my finite money to people I don't dislike. The impact on me of reading one versus the other is pretty minimal.
Rationally, there are problems with this. First, talented people are rarer than you think. Moreover, the very nature of their talent is the kind of thing that tends to fail purity tests. Second, if your purity test is strict, then no-one can pass it. Are you a bigot? What about your hair-dresser, they are a known bigot, and yet you still go there? You like Shakespeare, a known anti-semite? If you weaken your purity test, to accomodate messy, practical reality, then what does that say about your motivation?
Ethically, there's a big problem with this. People are valuable in-and-of themselves. Discarding people so easily is to devalue human life, and all the complexity that entails. If you yourself ever failed your own purity test, now or in the past, then why haven't you discarded yourself? If you haven't done that, then how committed are you to your brand of purity?
Ethnographically, there's a problem with this. Most of the people in the world are deeply bigoted. Tribalism runs deep in our DNA. African tribes still hate each other, Asians famously dislike each other (and being mistaken for the hated group), and so on. Most of humanity, those groups you're trying to be more inclusive of, are excluded by your test.
It is ironic in the extreme that humanism has become so intolerant of humanity.
>You like Shakespeare, a known anti-semite?
You are now applying this retroactively which is not the discussion at hand. Please don't put together straw man arguments.
edit: You're arguing absolutes when change is a gradual imperfect uneven messy process. It has always been and will always be. There are no absolutes because humanity is not a hive mind.
Harvey Weinstein produced Pulp Fiction. He's also a sexual predator. What's your call? Can you still like Pulp Fiction, now?
CEOs are spokesman for their company. When a spokesman with a massive platform makes statements at odds with the people their company sells to, they're clearly an improper fit for that position.
He wasn't cancelled. His employers found his statements to be at odds with the compnay's plans for success.
> But firing? Cancelling? Is that the price of the sin of sharing your personal political opinion these days?
If I become the pope and then make a tweet saying "God is obviously not real", is the catholic church wrong in trying to remove me from my position? Was I right for it in the first place?
As usual on HN, this post is pearlclutching at actions that have existed for hundreds of years and are pure common sense.
Please don't take part in this sort of nonsense. Respect the rights of everyone to speak freely, without fear of losing their livelihood.
In other words, this is bullying. Make it stop.
I think it is important that employees should have the right to express their non-work-related political opinions on social media, and no one should lose their job for doing so.
It is justifiable to make an exception to that right for really extreme political opinions, such as praising Hitler or the KKK; but not for politely expressing mainstream political opinions, and agreeing with a recent action by the US Supreme Court is mainstream by definition.
I know some people argue it is different because he is CEO, but I don't agree. I actually think it is important that the rule applies to CEOs too. If lower level employees see the CEO speaking their mind on politics and getting away with it, that makes them feel more confident they can too. If the CEO loses their job for doing so, that makes lower level employees worry they might meet the same fate, and arguing that "the rules are different for CEOs" is unlikely to reassure them.
Would you like to ban people from deciding which companies they support or ban companies from firing people that cost them money?
If people are boycotting a company because one of its employees belongs to a protected class – and laws against political discrimination make political belief a protected class – then it will likely be illegal for the employer to fire that employee on account of the boycott. They may legally have no choice but to endure it. It is no different in principle from people choosing to boycott a company for employing a member of any other kind of protected class.
"Proud of #USSupremeCourt affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat. As an entertainer I don’t get political often. Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of this issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer."
The Left is now ascendant in many parts of the culture, but that may not always be the case.
The law will hit the Supreme Court again, and either it or Roe will be overturned. But from a process perspective, the Court didn't say the law was constitutional.