RedBalloon – free speech job board
redballoon.work
redballoon.work
Sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. Also, who wants to work for a company that is essentially reaching out to hire more racists?
Most of these places have a minimum wage of $11-$15/hr, so they're paying pretty much nothing for hard labor tedious jobs.
Define racist content, and what is not racist content.
EDIT: I am serious, since Twitter mobs define it in a way that suits a political agenda, obviously, to "cancel" someone.
EDIT PS: Bring the downvotes.
I believe you make an excellent point
What much of the mainstream population interprets as racist behavior (a significant example being WW2 caricatures) would be considered both classically racist, and neoracist.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations would also be considered by many to be classically racist, but not neoracist. As neoracism views everything through a lense distorted by privilege theory, hegemony, and critical race theory, this would instead be viewed as a counter to previous racism. "Sure, give the unprivileged a leg up at the expense of the privileged, that white man doesn't need it."
If we apply the same to sexism, there are then two definitions of sexism - a classical one, and a neosexist one. One affirms what we know biologically speaking are the differences, and tendencies. Neosexism on the other hand, is viewed through a gender theory lense, tempered with CRT and privilege theory, completely malleable, and in many cases, rejecting the science of biology. Level setting to disadvantage men would be a plus. However, in neosexism, the pecking order would start with men at the lowest, followed by genetic women, and then into modified/self-identified and others.
We could also carry this though in sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, etc. For example, classical discrimination against traditionalist religious groups such as Christians, Muslims, and Observant Jews are frowned upon. But, in a neo-sense, discrimination against them, for having privilege or being part of power structures, would be a benefit, even, dare I say, celebrated, particularly if they benefit from Western Civilization.
This goes a long way towards explaining what we can observe as outgrowth of Critical Theory / Privilege Theory.
The result isn't so much "you can't be racist against whites", but rather "blacks/PoC and minorities can't be racist".
It’s already illegal to discriminate but should we really demand that everyone like each other too?
Keep work out of politics not just politics out of work.
Your characterization of racism as a "belief" is alarming.
What word would you use for something someone believes is true, even if it isn't? I'm having a really hard time imagining what's wrong with the word "belief" here, to talk about the state of someone's mental expectations of the world.
Racist people don't magically become unbiased in the workplace.
People can and do change, and most of them can compartmentalize in the mean time. "Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person, and it's too easy to scope creep once you've got the weapon of ostracism and censorship ready at hand. No matter how wrong they are, we can't just permanently deny people access to jobs and public life. That makes them martyrs.
Please can you stop using this line of reasoning to dismiss racist behavior, it's incredibly frustrating to read this in this context. The risk with hiring someone who's being discriminatory is that they'll act in a discriminatory way towards the other employees, which then puts those other employees at risk for being denied access to jobs and public life. The weapon of of ostracism and censorship is already being wielded once that discriminatory rhetoric has been put out, perhaps you're trying to have good intentions and be forgiving, but the way you're going about it guarantees you'll be a step too late and the damage will have been done already.
If you do, fair enough. I certainly don't.
Also. '"Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person' I would love to know the secret to changing someone's mind on this. I think the whole world would to be honest. If it were that easy, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Sadly in USA circa 2021 many people have forgot elementary moral wisdom.
Matthew 7:1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
Matthew 7:2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:3 "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
John 8:7 He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
Romans 12:17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil.
This guy seems to have a pretty good track record: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
One thing that helps is just exposure to counterexamples of whatever bias a person has. If someone thinks that all of group A are lazy, show them hard-working members of group A.
Again, maybe you're trying to be forgiving when you say "we can't just deny people access to jobs and public life" but we absolutely can do that when they become a detriment to everybody else involved in those jobs and public life. It's sad but it's true. For people who are particularly detrimental to the point where they commit hate crimes, we send them to prison.
Maybe not like each other, but acknowledging their coworkers right to exist should be required.
[0]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/06/case-for-liberal...
I get that it's hard to craft precise moderation rules, but drafting policy based on the rare exception seems strictly harmful.
Citation needed there. If someone makes sexist and racist comments, their coworkers often conspire to get them fired.
This seems to be pretty obviously courting people with a particular political lean, not simply people who don't want to talk about politics.
> This seems to be pretty obviously courting people with a particular political lean
2) People (especially political pundits and libertarian minded tech people) have been crying for more free market principles to exist. Don't like Facebook is sharing your pictures? Good, stop using the service then. Is that the free market at work or is it cancel culture?
3) Whether an organization deems employees actions political or not doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is what the audience deems political. If an employee gets "canceled" and you refuse to fire the person resulting in an impact to your financials, you better have a good reason to tell your board why you suffered economic loss.
I have first hand experience with cancel culture in the workplace. At a former company, we had an employee (one of ~60) who tweeted something critical about Trump during his presidency that was drug out into the spotlight (it got Fox News coverage) by Trump Jr. Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).
When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Has anything like this reached the media, or is the media at similar risk? I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.
Why on earth would I go to the media about <Insert PE Fund with $10B AUM that I don't want to name> when doing so would definitely guarantee me not working in that industry again? Think about that for a second.
To be clear "canceling" in the sense of "cancel culture" was coined by the cancelers. It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.
As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true. Certainly campaigns of targeted harassment have always existed (which is to say "canceling" has always existed), but the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel. Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
The canonical exception which proves the rule was the Dixie Chicks' cancellation as a result of their criticism of the war, and even then to get that kind of a response, the Dixie Chicks had to say something which offended a supermajority of Americans, while "cancel culture" today is typically about offending a small minority (roughly 10%).
> When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political". Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan, and I think your anecdote proves that it's not. There are elements of the left and the right for whom "cancel culture" is an apt description. Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott
> Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
Keep in mind social media has drastically amplified the attention we point on cancel culture. Both the "cancelling" itself but as well as people talking about it. Perhaps that has also increased the amount of events happening, but it doesn't mean it hasn't existed (see Boycotting above).
> Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political".
You have to be able to define what cancel culture is first. As my little story pointed out, there is nothing I can do as a business to recourse clients not buying my product as a result of an employee getting "canceled".
> Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan
Maybe, but trying to assign a political party to the use of its weaponry you're only further creating a divide and therefore creating partisan. In other words, if you conclude that the left/right they're using cancel culture they'll only dig their heals in more and project that the opposite side is weaponizing it.
> Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
Ultimately the fact that there isn't a commonly accepted definition regardless of political affiliation is what holds us back from either eliminating it or accepting it as simply free market principles.
Maybe one of the more prominent victims was Oppenheimer, who created the atomic bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer .
The only thing that is different now is that the shoe is on the other foot. I guess when some people find they no longer have license to be an asshole the transition can feel a bit uncomfortable and needing to learn about these things called 'consequences' that everyone else has been forced to endure must seem a bit strange.
I replied to "the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel", with the Dixie Chicks as the "canonical example".
Surely, providing an older example that predates the Dixie Chicks, can be used to argue that the phenomenon is, indeed, older, no?
There isn't a conspiracy being suggested. The use of this term was heavily promoted last year by certain people and news outlets towards a certain demographic. In other words, the meme took off and became viral: https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-cancel-culture-tuck...
Further polling data illustrates the effect of this, where views on the term are split among party lines: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/how-america...
> That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.
One of these things is not like the other...
While the idea of being “pro-freespeech” I agree with, in practice the people I've encountered who frequently express sentiments like what's featured on their page are uncomfortable to be around or discuss most anything that's not specifically work related with.
That was always the policy in school growing up too. I really don't know why we ever strayed from that rule.
Mmmm, freedom.
I’m interested in whether or not my interpretation is correct.
"Applicants must be conservative and must have a desire to support and defend US Constitutional rights."
Its a reasonable requirement for a campaign worker, but what is this doing on this "free-speech" board?
Same as if they make comments comparing black people to apes, rant about how much you hate gays, or (yes!) share your thoughts about how you wish white people would disappear.
It's becoming exhausting being a non-US netizen. It takes effort to constantly be vigilant and switch context and detect US political double speak.
I am really not sure I am doing this right and I am tired...
Here are some of the things that make me read it as such; perhaps this will make it a little easier for you to deal with our stupid culture wars in the future:
* prominent use of red - the color used to signify Republicans in electoral maps since around 2000
* complaining about "cancel culture"
* a lot of companies listed on the front have descriptions that make reference to Christianity; while Americans who identify as "Christian" are actually pretty evenly split as to party affiliation(1), Democratic Christians are generally pretty quiet about their beliefs, while Republican Christians are often very loud about them and their desire to make everyone conform to them regardless of religion.
* talking about employees who "value freedom", Republicans love to talk about "freedom" and how it is being impinged by things like "people calling them assholes".
1: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/christian...
Authoritarian Consensus
Decision by the Standing Committee
Hivemind Policy
At this point in the culture war, I'd probably rather work for a small Christian company than some of the BigTech corps, all other things being equal. And I'm an atheist. Never thought I'd say something like that, but here we are.
And so here we are: a job board to help the far right dodge consequences for their hate speech.
I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
Right, but that's precisely the point--the same is true everywhere ("median" doesn't work differently when applied to Europe or Asia! (: ).
> It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.
You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.
> I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
I think you're being unduly defensive here. No one is saying you have to fix any other place before remarking about racism in your own country. I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
A country can be both profoundly wealthy on paper and have a massive indigent population. Statistics like median income don't account for the extraordinary individual debt, poor average healthcare outcomes, or the absence of basic social safety nets that Americans accept without blinking. Compare us to our development cohort on median wage alone and we look normal, but the median American goes home each day with more debt and fewer guardrails against poverty than nearly every other median citizen in the developed world.
> I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
I'm not going to claim to know every developed country's constitution or founding documents, but I'm pretty sure most don't have a 3/5ths clause the way that ours does. The US is a deeply racist country, down to our founding principles. It might not look like the kind of racism that passes for normal in other countries, but it's a category error to conflate that difference in kind with a difference in severity or deep-rootedness.
But it hardly matters, we can campaign for a higher minimum wage without arguing that the US is a terrible place. And I'll go a bit further--not only is the wild hyperbole unnecessary, it's actively harmful to the campaign for a higher minimum wage because people associate the issue with liars.
The original claim was that the US needed a higher minimum wage.
> $13.50/hr
Where is this number from? The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, unchanged since 2009. The only states with numbers like you've quoted are the ones you're also telling people to look beyond.
> arguing that the US is a terrible place
Neither I, you, nor nacho2sweet are saying that so I'm not sure why you're bringing that into this.
- A secular, pluralistic public forum,
- A professional respect for the opposition, and
- The ability to disagree in one area without affecting other areas of a relationship.
Right now this comment section is failing on all three, and proving why, despite whatever one's personal views are, job boards like this are necessary to prevent the destruction of the respectful opposition that allows democracy to thrive.
Just remember, when clamoring for censorship and destroying someone's career because of their beliefs, that every weapon we create can be used against us.
Turnabout is fair play, as they say. Today it's ostensibly truth beating hoax when the left is suppressing anti-scientific fringe views about pandemics or climate change, but yesterday it was also ostensibly truth beating lies when the right was suppressing gay rights, and tomorrow the pendulum can swing somewhere completely unexpected once again.
So let's all be more tolerant of one another, because reasoned, respectful disagreement is the fundamental force that allows democracy to exist.