Moral Panics and the Death of Fun | Hacker News Reader

Moral Panics and the Death of Fun

paxdickinson.wordpress.com

42 pointslexcorvus20 comments

Moral Panic? Fun?

This guy was a C-level exec for a financial journal making rape jokes and using racial slurs without even the pretense of "my opinions do not represent my employer".

Sorry, to ruin your "fun", bro. The "misfits and troublemakers" quote you're building this on refers to people innovating and working against the system to make something new, not insulated fratboys making rape jokes on twitter.

You can have your free speech, but no one has to pay you to keep a prominent position while making it clear that you are espousing illegal hiring practices and being an otherwise narrow-minded dipshit. You are not a rabble-rouser or mischief maker, just a retrenchment of the same bullshit most everyone else in the world is sick of.

You drew the target on your back and are whining that people pulled the trigger.

Thanks for playing, though!

Couldn't have said it better myself. Love that he framed Gamergate as a rebellion against the "PC" media.

Exactly. These weren't "dissenting & unpopular opinions in technology" (as he frames them), but hateful, ignorant, and even regressive opinions.

Twitter posts are serious business, and this guy is a good example of how you can fuck yourself by forgetting that Twitter is a public medium.

Having said that, I think we should consider whether the dude really deserved the incredible backlash against him. Being retributive can give us a sense of righteousness, but in the end all this comes down to is punishing a guy for embracing the "wrong" subculture.

edit: I can understand being uncomfortable about his comments, and possibly even wanting to fire him over them. What I take issue with is the hateful attitude people have taken towards him. It's (imo) hypocritical to call someone a "fratboy" while deriding them for derogatory comments.

As far as I know there are no actual instances of sexist behavior attributed to Pax Dickinson outside of shitty jokes on Twitter. He might be an ass, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with de-facto blacklisting purely as a response to offensive speech.

(And since this is deep in identity politics territory I'm saying that as a gay man of middle eastern ancestry.)

I think it has a great deal of worth, especially considering how much people in his (and most) industries operate with twitter as a public-facing manifestation of yourself.

Secondly, not wanting to do business with someone because they are an ass...sounds pretty reasonable to me.

It's reasonable in the individual case, but the effect is still forcing someone out of the industry for making blasphemous, err, offensive jokes. (not, as far as we know, being an ass at work) This seems uncomfortably similar to blacklisting someone for being a Communist, even if it's an emergent blacklisting and not a top-down edict.

what was the real crime here?

making off color jokes?

or not realizing exactly how publically he was making them?

edit - I find it interesting to contrast this thread with this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8484312 interesting

I find it curious that people seem to think "freedom of speech" somehow equates to "freedom from consequences." You can say what you want, but if you tweet racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks, or say them out loud for that matter, don't be surprised if your employer, friends, and family decide you're a jerk and unceremoniously dump you.

It's not a "liberal elite" enforcing their will. It's that you're offensive and people don't like you.

This numbers among the worst cases of self-righteous apologia I've ever encountered.

Face it, Pax: This isn't about having your career "irretrievably damaged" for "having fun". This is about getting caught and called out for having been an asshole. Full stop. Those two categories don't have to overlap, and I'm perfectly within my rights not to want to work with, or be around, people who think they do.

> Death of Fun

When your fun is directly at the expense of people who don't share your gender, skin color, class, or orientation, maybe it should die.

> this was speech on the internet. No one was physically harmed by my tweets. Relief was never more than a Block button away.

When you are a public figure of any kind, your personal values will either be exposed as soon as you are given a microphone or they will be unearthed later. The fact that he crafted these unfunny and tasteless jokes and is now pulling the "free speech" card while blaming others for not blocking his account sooner.

People who pull the "free speech" card always seem to forget that while the government cannot infringe in this inalienable right, it does not insulate you from the social consequences of that speech.

Also I don't think he was fired for his tweets, but for his opinions.

Put another way, he wasn't fired for tweeting hateful things, but for having those opinions. All his tweets did was show the world that he was this hateful person, one who shouldn't be in a position of power.

Nothing happened merely because he held opinions. It was when he began expressing them in a harmful and embarrassing manner that it became a problem for him.

So I started reading with an open mind, but then made the mistake of clicking on a link to his tweets[1].

At that point I stopped reading because I really don't care what he has to say unless it's remorse and repentance. Those aren't off-color jokes, those are hateful screeds that reflect a real lack of character. I not only would have fired you, I would have reviewed our hiring process to make sure we didn't get anyone like that again.

Pax, if you can't own your mistakes and recognize that hateful awfulness isn't funny then I don't think you should be writing stuff on the internet.

[1] http://unvis.it/valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-i...

I've had a lot of dealings with the "I'm just expressing my opinions" crowd. I think it's a disingenuous claim. You're not being shunned merely for opinions, you're being shunned because your application of those opinions is actively harmful.

Somebody emailed us who was worried that letting this post be killed by user flags was unfair to other users who were carrying on a legit discussion. They asked if we were meaning to suppress the defense of an unpopular point of view. The answer is no, and we've unkilled this thread accordingly, although it's so late that doing so is mostly symbolic.

We often unkill flag-killed threads precisely so discussion can continue. Had we been more aware of this post at the time, we probably would have done that. There's too much material on the site for us to be aware of it all. That's why you should email hn@ycombinator.com if you see something amiss—that's guaranteed to bring it to our attention.

Maybe kill the link to the story next time, though? Let the thread live, but not the promotion of bad content or (more importantly) the framing that content provides for the thread.

"I have a long, long record of successfully working with women, working for women, and having women working for me."

This is the "some of my best friends are X" defense, for X = women.

Given that women make up 50% of humans, this is somewhat less convincing than when X = gay or X = black. And it's been shown to be totally unconvincing even then.

I'm guessing this is being upvoted to give everyone a voyeuristic glimpse to a slow train wreck

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