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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

On X, Conservative commentator Candace Owens called Pietsch "young and stupid" after her video went viral: "Now any company that googles Brittany Pietsch will come across this video of her secretly recording the company she was employed at to expose them for doing their job. Unbelievably shortsighted."

Candace Owens is also known for her flippant suggestion that 'Hitler was trying to make Germany great again'. If the best source the BBC can come up with for the alternative POV is a nazi-adjacent social media troll, perhaps they should reconsider their cognitive biases.

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Regardless of bad commentary, it’s a cogent point. Debate the idea, not the idiot.

Credibility matters. If someone is equivocating genocide with “making Germany great again”, it deserves to be pointed out and their testimony taken with a huge grain of salt.

I was under the impression that the German economy was vastly improved under Hitler, so I think that point at least is valid.

Because he funded military and conquest paid for that. In the long run he devastated Germany and half Europe with it.

Go read Götz Ali's Hitler's Beneficiaries, which lays out in exhaustive detail the combination of financial chicanery and outright theft that was used to channel wealth toward his political base.

While the risk is obvious, what is the alternative ?

You can go down as a number on the spreadsheet, or you can show everyone else they are also numbers on a spreadsheet.

Her behaviour is a first step towards a different workplace. The effectiveness is questionable, but what more can a single, non organized individual can do ?

Some people really thrive in the cage and would prefer to not acknowledge it's existence. That's what this entire thing really boils down to.

No one's saying she did something immoral. Instead the implication is that she broke some social code. Because of course we're all operating on the assumption that corporations hold the power and we should be grateful that they take pity on us to exploit us at all.

Everyone else with any measure of maturity knows they're just numbers on a spreadsheet. It's not a startling revelation.

How many people act like they know this?

Given how many people are willing to burn themselves out because of their job I’m going to guess not too many.

They could have quoted someone else who made the same point. Instead they chose to give more attention to a troll.

No. Anyone can form a superficially cogent argument when they don't need to defend it. This one is fallacious because it assumes its conclusion (hard working managers doing their jobs, rather than the reality of being unable to articulate what expectations the laid-off employee failed to meet).

Further, engaging with bad actors (who are generally cynics rather than idiots) normalizes their standing as commentators/public figures, and gives them opportunity to push shitty ideas into public discourse. They're PR professionals who understand how to exploit the dynamics of social media very well and imho to the general detriment.

It’s not a cogent point but a distraction: as an authoritarian, Owens is naturally predisposed to assuming the company is in the right but a more accurate framing recognizes that this was not HR doing their jobs but HR lying about someone to make it sound like they were being fired for cause. Doing their jobs would have been “we’re doing a layoff, here are the terms of your severance”, and recognizing that Owens is an unreliable source is important for not letting her framing shape the discussion.

I find the whole article to downplay and minimize the impact of CloudFlair's actions.

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