What if it’s the Devil’s Lettuce?
Yeah @Sam_Stone, Democrats are just so anti-business. That’s why the stock market tanked once Biden took office. Google and Facebook were so hampered by their leftist policies that they never managed to get off the ground as businesses, so that’s why social media is so conservative. Amazon can only dream of being as successful as Hobby Lobby.
Of course, that’s sarcasm. Most US businesses are very liberal.
That’s why the zip code 10021, NYC’s Upper East Side, the home to the stodgy rich and famous titans of finance ( the young upstarts are down in Tribeca) voted like 85% Democrat. Even the voting precinct Trump Tower is located in ( and it may be the only residential building in the precinct) went for Biden 67% to 32%. That’s why those hateful religious freedom laws can’t get off the ground, every time a state tries to pass one, the entire business community threatens to boycott them.
Business is dominated by liberals and the only people that don’t know that are the ones that listen to the falsehoods pushed by right wing media and believe them.
But if you believe Democrats hate businesses and embrace policies guaranteed to kill them, therefore all successful businesses must be conservative. And they’ll hire all the conservatives, and you’ll work long hours for low pay and you won’t get safety equipment or lunch breaks or working fire extinguishers because those are business-killing regulations, but you’ll have all the jobs, right? So what’s the problem?
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tantrum about how much liberals hate businesses and want to kill them, then turn around and tantrum about how all the good thriving businesses are run by liberals that won’t hire you. It doesn’t scan.
I only intended to post a one line reply to @Babale, but I forgot to stop.
These are the rules your side wanted, Sam. Your the side that has argued - vigorously - in favor of the right of employers to fire their workers for any reason they want. It’s only now that “conservative” is something that employers are selecting against that suddenly there’s a problem with that.
You realize there’s a difference between the right to fire someone for any reason, and the adviseability of doing so?
You also have the right to cheat on your wife. The government won’t come after you. I would never advocate that the government pass a law against cheating. But if you do it, it still makes you a jerk and will likely not work out well for you, your spouse, or the person you are cheating with.
Likewise, I’m saying that if you are using your company as an extension of your ideology and choosing hires based on whether they have the same political beliefs you do, your company will be at a disadvantage, you will make an enemy, and contribute to the increasingly toxic atmosphere of today’s body politic. If many people on the left do it, it will have a negative cultural impact and an impact on America’s competitiveness.
This new culture of ‘watch what you say - or else’ will not end well for anyone. At best it will harm the economy by taking focus off of ability and merit and putting it on social conformance. At worst, it will lead to increasing hatred between left and right and possibly an even stronger backlash against the left when the time comes.
One of the things I hated about Trump (and warned against) was his habit of intentionally getting under the skin of Dekocrats and antagonizing them. I knew it would generate a backlash, amd here it is. Now I’m warning the lett of the same thing. At some point, we need adults and statesmen who will dial back the rhetoric and the attempts to punish or silence the ‘other’ side. But it appears we are being ruled by children. On both sides.
What exactly is “new” about it? The only difference is, now you get blackballed for being a racist, not for being gay. Sounds like a good change to me!
The “backlash” isn’t because he got under our skin. It’s because he’s a psychotic fascist insurrectionist criminal. And regarding his employees, insane pro-crime employees have limited utility as employees. They can probably lay bricks with the best of them, but they probably would be less useful in human resources. And of course in todays world companies have to worry about lunatic employees bringing heat down on them.
And yeah, you’re so worried about liberals firing people because of reasons like this, but of course IOWARDI. Sooo impressive. And convincing. Yeah.
It’s worth pointing out that this sanitized terminology of “same political beliefs” versus “different political beliefs” is badly misrepresenting the sort of screening that’s actually being defended by most of the posters here.
Nobody at all here, AFAICT, is saying that it’s ethical or desirable for bosses to require their workers to agree with them on all, or even on most, political issues. Contrast that with the notorious case of the employee who got fired in 2004 just for having a pro-Kerry bumper sticker on her car, while her Bush-supporting boss considered himself entitled to stuff employees’ pay envelopes with pro-Bush propaganda.
But refusing to hire somebody who’s endorsing seriously criminal behavior and/or delusional lies isn’t a matter of bullying people into ideological conformity. It’s a matter of recognizing the difference between reality and fantasy. Sam’s attempts to “bothsides” this issue into a false equivalence are not valid reasoning.
What world have you been living in? Companies in America have been excluding people for their lifestyle and beliefs for hundreds of years, and we’re on top. Did it hurt competitiveness when the only jobs women could get were as secretaries? When blacks weren’t allowed into labor unions (or pretty much anywhere)? When gays were forced to be closeted to work at all? Where being a “anti-war hippie” was a fast way to get your ass canned from any white collar job?
The only thing “new” about the culture is that the intolerant are now in the crosshairs for a change.
Actually, no. I don’t buy into the idea that there are a significant number of principled conservatives who are opposed to laws protecting gay people, who do not also intend to use the absence of such laws as an opportunity to discriminate against gay people. For a small minority, it’s a fig leaf for not doing anything to help a group of people they simply don’t give a shit about. For the vast majority, it’s about seeking legal cover for treating gay people like second class citizens.
If you were concerned about America’s competitiveness, you perhaps should not have spent the majority of your life supporting political parties that have actively lobbied for the suppression and exclusion of segments of the population based on factors like race, gender, sexuality, and, yes, political beliefs.
It’s not a new culture, Sam. It’s the same culture everyone who was not white, straight, male, and Christian has lived in since the founding of the country. It’s only knew to you, because being those things is no longer a guarantee of better treatment.
Conservatives fought for a century against the concept of respecting people equally. So what you get is people getting disrespected equally. Congratulation, Sam, you guys won.
This is the sort of ludicrously biased false equivalence I’m talking about. Trump as equivalent to Biden in maturity and statesmanship? Liberal rhetoric as equivalent to conservative rhetoric in aggressiveness and mendacity? Nonsense.
Maybe Sam was in fact talking about Canadian politics, given his otherwise odd use of the pronoun “we”, and if so then I can’t speak to the accuracy or otherwise of his assessment. But in the context of US politics, this kind of misleading bothsidesism is just a desperate attempt by the formerly mainstream conservative rump faction to pull the wool over liberal eyes.
Formerly mainstream conservatives in the US are realizing that they can’t retain power without one or more of the following:
a) pandering to deranged and often violent true-believer MAGA types who reject science, facts, rational thought and democratic principles in favor of whatever whackjob conspiracty theory or shameless lawlessness happens to take their fancy;
b) suppressing or invalidating a large proportion of the popular vote;
c) conning or guilting non-conservatives into accepting them as rational and principled partners in the mission of governance, and pretending that the two sides are meaningfully comparable.
All of this is just the snake oil of desperation. If any principled conservative (and surely there must be some left somewhere?) wants to argue honestly for a particular rational and law-abiding conservative position, then they’re morally entitled to make that argument. But they’re not morally entitled to try to sell that argument by falsely pretending that political dishonor, corruption and incompetence are just as bad on the other side as on their own.
The right wing political and media outlets have been working furiously to create such people, winding them tighter and tighter and pushing them further and further from reality because, increasingly, any realistic assessment of things would show that many right-wing talking points (particularly economic ones) have been utterly disproven by the evidence of history. To retain their base, they fervently encourage the crazy.
Which has now reached the point of making them so crazy that some segments of society are starting to consider them dangerous to employ.
As Ann_Hedonia astutely pointed out:
Yup. “Get woke, go broke” and “oh noes the liberals are using their superior economic power to repress us” are mutually incompatible whines.
What we on “the left” have finally figured out, Sam, is that anything we do will cause the right to hate us more, and to try to inflict a stronger backlash against us whenever they get the chance. It’s fundamentally the existence of our liberal principles that you guys object to, and the more we try to compromise on them to conciliate you, the harder you will attack them.
It’s a sucker’s game to try to coax you into bipartisan cooperation: if bipartisan cooperation could get you something you wanted, you’d already be doing it. The right wing doesn’t want cooperation and bipartisanship for the good of the country as a whole; they want to govern in their own narrow interests as a minoritarian elite.
What we on the left need to do is focus on policies that support the rights and the well-being of everybody—including the conservatives who are always going to treat us as “the enemy”—and try to produce results that speak for themselves in appealing to voters. If any public-spirited conservatives want to cooperate with these aims, while trying to make a rational and factual case for conservative approaches that will actually improve the results, they’re welcome to do so. But there’s simply no point to liberals wasting any more time trying to get a bunch of tantrumming toddlers on board with their program in the name of “bipartisanship”.
Take a look here - this is where Trump rhetoric has taken the the political right, and also note that both GOP leaning donators and a significant backing from older style Republicans supported the campaign to ensure free & fair elections because they appreciate just how much economic damage could be caused if the election process became broken - then tell me about the right wing conspiracy to steal the election and why anyone would want to employ someone who had been any small part of it = Oh, and don’t forget the golden rule of policitic, always accuse your opposition of behaving in exactly the same way as you are behaving yourself
Read it, read it all, and then wonder just how that might be used in the senate trial because it seems to me that there is a huge case to simply put Trump into prison immediately after the trial has taken place.
I don’t think anyone here is considering the firing of a McCain or Romney type of conservative, despite a difference in political views. However a Trumpist Stop the Stealer clearly can’t think very logically and is probably a racist. That’s plenty of reason.
If you find an employee is a Nazi, you don’t fire him because of his views on economic policy.
When the time comes? Does January 6, 2021 mean anything to you? Does Greene advocating the killing of Democratic leaders and not being punished for it?
One of the Democratic leader, in response to the Republicans being so upset about Greene losing her committee seats, said that if any Democrat had advocated the killing of a Republican he or she would lose committee positions right away.
It is okay to punish those who cross the line, unless you keep moving the line more and more into extremist territory.