There is an enormous supply of workers who don't want social and political issues in the workplace, but silently acquiesce because saying anything gets you branded negatively and quickly canceled. It doesn't matter if you agree but prefer keeping it out of the workplace; you must either support the woke brigade or keep your mouth shut.
Keeping your mouth shut is no longer an option “silence is violence” and “not taking a position is a position” have taken over. The issue at Basecamp was that activists were harassing other employees to get them to make public statements on issues.
Of course. By "clarify", I meant you will be forced to toe the party line if you don't want to be passed up.
There are still many of us out there who believe that hiring candidates based on their race is not healthy for society, the company, or any individual candidate. That opinion is largely being stamped out, by design, in management at the orgs I'm talking about.
This has nothing to do with not wanting to step up and manage.
> You don’t think conservatives do exactly the same thing? Cancelling isn’t unique to the left nor something that just recently started.
Yes, conservatives did the same thing during Mccarthyism, and it's widely accepted to have been a bad thing. A different group having made the same mistake in the past is a reason not to do it again, not an excuse to do more of it.
Might the current efforts to make it harder for specific demographics to vote be considered a form of canceling?
Is gerrymandering a form of canceling?
Because the problem with McCarthyism was the government infringing on freedom of association.
On the other hand, the kind of cancelling that gets talked about today is simply people independently exercising their freedom of association, and it's being made into a boogie man to take those choices away from people.
I don't have a problem with conservatives doing it either as long as they don't enforce it on others, and don't do it for the protected classes. Everything else is fair game for both sides.
I think you missed my point. It’s not about party governance.
The more reactionary elements are, to put it politely, bullies. Stefanik went to school a few blocks away from me and her evolution/devolution has been well publicized even before she hit the national spotlight. It makes her the perfect patsy.
She has been “rewarded” for loyalty, but has to double down on whatever. The problem is you have to do what the bullies want or you’re in the cold.
The issue for the public at large is you have a coalition of reactionaries, losers (the Colorado bartender with a gun fetish turned Representative) and compromised people whose only path forward is double down on extremism. There’s a non-zero probability that someone like Rep. Greene will accuse POTUS of being a alien lizard-person. It’s exactly the same as McCarthy.
It's not the same as McCarthy because they aren't nuking someone's access to anything other than Republican party leadership. McCarthy could take away random citizen's livelihood; Greene is just playing politics in a gross way with other politicians.
They do it today, too. Conservatives in my area canceled a small business because the owners shared a BLM meme on Facebook. They even got the local PBA spokesperson to smear the business all over media, as well. The owners had to take down their social media profiles, and felt pressured enough to release a statement for apologizing for the meme.
It wasn’t just the Red Scare. Black people were cancelled by default. Jews were tolerated, at best, and quota’d out of leadership roles. Women were functionally disallowed from being anywhere near whole classes of employment. Gay people were forced to hide and remain closeted to even be allowed in polite company.
Most of what right wingers complain about being “cancelled” for are perpetuating arguments to restore the bad old days where members of all those groups were treated as second or third class citizens. Can you blame them for occasionally being a little overexuberant in telling you to STFU?
> Can you blame them for occasionally being a little overexuberant in telling you to STFU?
Absolutely. If you claim the moral high ground, you cannot possibly expect to be taken seriously if you make the same mistakes as the people you are criticizing.
That's fine. Struggling for power is absolutely okay. It is natural. Let's recognize it for what it is.
What I don't accept is virtuous claims that people want equality. It was never about that. It's about increasing their own group's power and privileges.
The responses to the Basecamp and Coinbase announcements were equally mixed between people who wanted to avoid them, and people who want to seek them out. There are plenty of people who want work to be about working together on work.
I for one want work to be welcoming and productive for everyone. Ironically, the best way to accomplish that is to focus on work, and not non-work.
Agreed, as long as there isn’t some major issue internally (sexism/racism) that affects your ability to work, or the work itself is an issue (being made to create distasteful content for example) I don’t want to think about politics at all.
I don’t want to have outside matters pushed on me while working regardless of how much I agree with them.
I’ll happily engage in activism outside of work where people aren’t forced to sit around me every day.
I don't resent people raising political or social arguments. Actually, I quite enjoy them and actively partake outside of hackernews. What I do resent is being told what the right answers are and forbidden from disagreeing on threat of termination and ostracisation. My own preference order is appropriate discussion of social issues, no discussion, told what the answers are without discussion.
Let me give an example. At my most recent job there is a monthly lunch for women at my level with our VP. Who is also a woman. The explicit topic of this lunch is career advancement for women. I learned about the lunch from my two female coworkers.
In order to get promoted you need to have feedback and buy off from upper management. Same for raises and bonuses. Now, I don't know, but I assume having a monthly meeting to talk about my career advancement with the VP of our group would be a benefit for the pursuit of getting promoted and getting more money.
My perception is that if I said something like "Hey, isn't it a bit unfair we give this perk to women and not men?" Is that I would be quickly shamed. If I stuck to it, I'd expect to get fired. I don't think I could even question the logic of it, and I do have some questions, without being fired.
Ironically, it strikes me as an extremely privileged perspective to have the same political beliefs as the company and also to insist on talking about them at the company. "We just want to say what the owners think and punish people who disagree. Who could object to that?"
Why not just look at the current ratios of managers and test your hypothesis that lunch with this VP helps? My personal experience is that lunch is cheaper for the company to give than raises; it enables them to look like they're doing something while dollars to donuts the actual gender ratios get more & more lopsided as the paychecks rise. Perhaps your company is unusual and this isn't the case, and this lunch actually accomplishes something. I'd be quite interested if that were so.
It's impossible to know if it did or didn't help people.
"Excuse me, do you think you're a manager now because of gendered benefits extended to you? Hmm? What's that? I should pack up my stuff?" I think if there was a men's group, to help men get promoted, that people wouldn't shrug and say "Maybe it doesn't help."
>My own preference order is appropriate discussion of social issues, no discussion, told what the answers are without discussion.
Surely "appropriate discussion" includes a lot of telling people what the answers are without discussion. It's just hidden from your view.
For instance, you would probably agree that your co-worker wearing a swastika, walking around the offices during lunch giving seig heils to his friends, is not "appropriate discussion". Nor would it be "appropriate discussion" for your coworker to wear his klan hood on casual Friday.
So where's the line between "appropriate discussion" and "told what the answers are"? Are you telling your poor nazi and klansman coworkers what the answers are, without discussion, when you ask them not to do such things?
While that’s true, there’s also ambiguity and difficulty involved in deciding what is and isn’t political. (For that matter, is “is this political?” political?)
Absolutely! There's no silver bullet here - to work well in a diverse group, you have to understand and accept that not everyone will be on exactly the same page. My own workplace says things I find to be too political from time to time, and I don't see that as an important problem. And I've definitely seen people who overcorrect in the other direction, turning over every rock to try and find hidden politics.
What doesn't work is the original commenter's idea that
> Everything is political. Even saying you don’t have a position is tacit endorsement of the status quo.
Because the logical conclusion of this argument, and I strongly suspect the intended conclusion, is that you should continue all political arguments at maximum intensity until you win. If my manager comes by and asks me to get back to work, I can't do it - that would be a tacit endorsement of the status quo!
Well, to be clear, this is a conclusion I've seen people explicitly draw - I'm not just making it up. There was a famous incident at Coinbase where a request to discuss an important political issue spiraled outwards and outwards, until a bunch of employees went on strike to demand the founder adopt their political slogan.
Often you can't talk about political issues in an adult and professional manner. Many issues have to do with deeply and passionately held beliefs; you can't expect people who believe that some law is taking their rights away, or that some war is an unjust slaughter, to discuss it in the same tone they'd use to discuss a project planning issue. You can make it work for some issues in some contexts, and I know plenty of people who successfully talk politics with groups of their coworkers over lunch. But companywide discussions about hugely controversial issues are almost never going to go well.
But did the klansman or the nazi have any political discussion? They're just wearing their funny outfits and walking around saying hello to their friends. If anything, someone complaining about their behavior is having political discussion.
Both the Klan and Nazis are political organizations so supporting them seems pretty clearly political speech. Similar, you wouldn't be allowed to wear your Klan hood or your Bernie Sanders hat to a polling station (where political displays like that are prohibited). (Although, of course, people probably wouldn't notice the Sanders hat)
You're going to throw accusations like "supporting the klan" or "supporting the Nazi party" around with only circumstantial evidence? You're one of those political discussion agitators after all.
These two fellows just think that the hats and armbands they're wearing are stylish accessories. And the hand motions? No more than a good triceps workout.
Suppose we worked at a sporting goods store and management noticed that employees and customers were regularly getting into arguments about teams, players, game outcomes, etc. So, management says to employees "Employees should not discuss their own personal views on sports. This will help us better serve customers and work together."
Well, once that new policy is in place, it won't exactly be a head scratcher as to how we should view an employee wearing the jersey of his favorite basketball player. Personal opinions on sports are out and wearing a sports jersey is clearing showing, or at clearly will be interpreted as showing, support for that basketball player.
My argument is that your preferred work policy - "appropriate discussion" is impossible without a lot of implied use of your least favorite policy - being "told what the answer is."
In turn, your second policy - "no political discussion" is practically unworkable. I demonstrate by an example. If you want to make it so your coworker can't wear his swastika, you must allow political discussion:
"This piece of clothing has a certain understood meaning in society, wearing it implies he supports xyz, any claims to the contrary are a fig leaf."
"No, no, I just like the look..."
And we have a political argument on our hands about whether such attire is appropriate.
In short, allowing no political discussion at the workplace is not possible.
As to your own metaphor, it falls flat. Everything is politics. Not everything is sports. It is very possible to go about your day without making any sporting statements, and impossible to not make political statements.
I think there will be ambiguity and good faith discussions and clarifications to settle expectations. I also think that people who insist on it will always be able to split hairs and invent arguments.
If the company has a policy that says "No unwanted touching of coworkers" and one employee hovers his hand over coworkers while taunting "I'm not touching you" the problem is not with the guideline. Likewise, if you say "No politics at work" and someone keeps coming up with creative arguments of the form "Technically isn't this politics" then the problem isn't with the guideline either.
you say that everything is political and I do not disagree. But I consider it is a essential professional skill to be able to at least minimise the prevalence and effects of political ideas in the workplace and anywhere where the subject and debate is not appropriate. Too many people are outright declaring they are entirely set against even considering adapting to the needs and requirements of and elementary civil courtesy and manners towards paymasters who already not only provide exceptional levels of pay and additional lifestyle enhancements alongside a job but also nothing less than incomparable freedom of expression in your actual performance of your work which is easily recognised by comparison with your freedom of solutions for the work involved in any other engineering job.
edit what baffles me - translation : disgusts me - is the total lack of consideration given by politically activist employees to their colleagues. It's time for this behaviour and practicing of intolerance to no longer be tolerated.
this prompted me to further thinking today (cut from a separate comment draft):
The recent discussion about how programmers are bringing politics to work with them has suddenly made me wonder how I'll find recruitment if I am open about this business being a means to a cultural end. The trick with having any political component in your business is maintaining the absolute separation and distinction between the objective and everything else : the moment you allow political thought or anything else for that matter to permeate your work, you're neutered. And if you don't maintain a very clear fix on and evaluative feedback from your goals then you will fail as well. I surprised myself yesterday I am so stridently from a older generation and mentality to generalise where from my views on work politics must appear to have arisen - irrespective the plain sensibility and logic and educational experience agreeing with me - since I am intensely political and have spent 30 years working on possible means to balance the power of advertising and more importantly to return to sub multinational scale companies the ability to advertise which is effectively denied by the status quo. I mean how is Amazon not political in the act of providing unprecedented access to literature.. [0]
The UK legislation prohibits all conduct of political aims via any incorporated business.
I don't know why I can't immediately tell you if the USA is the same or not, but I'll be surprised if it isn't.
if you need any better reason why you shouldn't allow politics in your workplace, I should say that this is why.
[0] rather than improve my logic and rewrite this conspicuously inconsistent statement, I have realised I want to go and think about this further in some depth. I have added my own self reply comment deliberately to contradict any impression that I have given of being a political in my work and life. I have seen here that I need to better delineate the distinction in my mind that separates politics from my business in the way I have entirely accurately reported, because I should be inclusive of my personal political animus and purpose that I have furthered through commercial activities. Of course, providing access to literature as Amazon did on unprecedented scale, is political and obviously not party political. However, non partisan action can very often be taken to be partisan tactics by individuals and organisations in party political life. However this is where I see that we need to eliminate all connections to partisanship attached to actions of social benefit. This is a problem inherent to privilege and social class structure and economic inequality. We need to urgently learn collectively the true political meaning of the ranges of corporate action which are presumed as being socially beneficial and aligned with Democrat policy and society and identify where this is not true. I'm looking immediately at the effects of the gig economy and the increasing similarity to serfdom and indenture that is the combined function of low interest rates and impossible to escape debts from education that's become compulsory irrespective if you have no ambition in accordance with the traditional necessity for university education. low interest rates have almost certainly forced into debt children of parents who in my generation could have paid for education from interest on modest savings. the current requirements for millions in capital in retirement is a insufferable burden I struggle to comprehend not least because I must save for retirement over again due to medical bills and I have barely the years of expected life in which to do so. the most important consequence is my company is re-established on financial assumptions designed to provide a retirement income within 20 years and that's very much faster than any employer is capable of doing, who has come to my attention m
I think that the real politics that has begun to enter into American and European business life is a financial political anxiety which is manifesting itself to become vocal and visible in very many different ways other than talking about money because especially in America we don't like to talk about how much we earn and less and less so because of increasing inequality.
and because of this social taboo I think I am beginning to understand why the introduction of political ideas into the workplace has been so fraught and emotional
but I'm not even started in my search for a understanding of this problem - all I know is that I have to actually find a way of resolving this contention if I am going to be able to retire myself, because the only likely employment I can get due to my health is the ongoing revival of my company which inevitably is going to face these issues head to head sooner than later.
It means that you are not interested when a politician or a work based group with political ideas (official or unofficial) tries to "recruit" you and join their cause telling you that they are fighting to elevate your rights and status.
You'll simply decline knowing full well that you can elevate yourself just as much (actually way more) solely with your hard work and performance.
The "saying you don't have a position is an endorsement of the status quo" argument implies that the entire world needs to stop until your favorite problem is fixed. That's a recipe for getting to the political equilibrium where anti-abortion voters live.
