I have no idea what you are going on about, but I will respond to the two parts that seem to be somewhat coherent and related to the topic.
I don’t care about Joe. If he is waiting tables, he’s a nobody. I’m certainly not going to check up on my waiters before eating out.
However, if Joe isn’t happy about being a nobody, and becomes prominent in his advocacy against SSM, then he has chosen to make his opinion known, with the knowledge that there can be consequences.
I probably would not eat at a restaurant that employed someone who advocated enough against SSM that he makes my radar. And if friends wanted to eat there, I would recommend against it. As to specifics, they are variable and malleable.
Your last paragraph makes many assertions that are not valid. Just as I would not be afraid of a public debate in the fear that I might be wrong, I also would not engage with someone who had no interest in an actual debate. Usually the way things like that go are one side brings facts and figures, and the other brings a gish gallop of falsehoods and insinuations. They make invalid assertions, drop loaded questions, and in general, have no interest in an actual debate, but instead, just using that platform as a soapbox in order to voice their noxious opinion.
Depends on what you mean by public and by shaming. If you mean mentioning to my friends that an employee there is an outspoken advocate for denying and removing their rights, then yes, I would. If you mean going on national TV, and saying that that restaurant hates gay people, no I wouldn’t. If you have something in between, please actually name it, I’ve done enough work to make your argument valid enough to actually debate against already.
Do you actually need a comprehensive list? I think that anyone with any sense would know, before they express an opinion, how it would be taken by the public. If you don’t know that, then you do not belong in the public sphere.
If you want me to buy into the premise that the motivation of the people signing this letter was so they could say abhorrent things without consequence, yes. I do. IMO, the only reason anybody’s talking about this thing is because JK Rowling’s name is on it.
Okay? So fill me in. You say this is about the signatories whining about not being able to say abhorrent things and keeping their platform. It follows that there would be a recorded pattern of them saying abhorrent things. If it doesn’t, then that is an extraordinary claim. So what are the abhorrent positions? Remember, there are 149 other people on here, and the signing was not collaborative. They didn’t know all the people that were going to be on the list.
Just to be clear, “the one the we have nailed down” has not “turned out to be nothing like what was described in the letter at all”; you have repeatedly asserted that, but you haven’t actually established it.
To recap what happened in that case: A left-leaning political analyst, David Shor, tweeted a link to a study titled “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting” (a paper which found that “in 1968, violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election”), with Shor’s words as follows:
First off, it’s an empirical point. I am unaware of anyone making any attempt to refute the empirical point. (“But this other study shows that violent riots increase turnout among Democratic Party core groups enough to be a net positive.”) Second, it’s an empirical point with some political agendas (because politics is what the guy does); those agendas include getting the Democratic Party to win the election and even approval of NON-violent demonstrations for racial justice (which, in addition to being the Right Thing to Do, also–according to Shor and Waslow–can actually be helpful in winning elections).
In response to this tweet, someone did not merely disagree with the points Shor was making; they accused Shor of being a racist, and launched a deliberate (“Come get your boy”) and successful attempt to get him fired from his job. Other people claimed that Shor’s tweet somehow “threatened their safety”.
At this point, I don’t think anyone is going to go through all of the other hypothetical examples from the Harper’s open letter and demonstrate how they correspond with real-world incidents, because there is such a huge, yawning chasm in the perceptions of people like k9bfriender and the perceptions of people who think the open letter is a good and reasonable thing.
I’m having trouble finding anything between us to debate. You are being too reasonable.
I’ll try one last thing. Could you be friends with a bona fide racist (presuming they are willing to stay friends with you)? Do you have it in you? Could you challenge his or her beliefs without making an attack on their character (presuming they can argue without personally attacking you)? Alternately, could you live with yourself if you remained friends but ignored the racism?
How do we know what was about Shor? That line in the letter in Harper’s? This sub-conversation in this thread?
As for the letter, do you know of any other cases of “a researcher [being] fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study” that might have inspired that line in the letter?
As for this thread, in post #35, k9bfriender said
In post #43 I gave the facts of the David Shor case (which is overwhelmingly likely to be what the authors of the open letter were thinking of when they mentioned “a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study”). Since then, k9bfriender referred to the Shor case “as the one [example in the letter] that we have nailed down turned out to be nothing like what was described in the letter at all”, and has indicated that he apparently thinks accusing someone of racism and getting him fired from his job is perfectly reasonable because that person posted the following:
Well, gee, on the one hand, maybe Shor’s boss invited him in to the office just to say “Wow, I can’t believe someone is trying to get you fired just for that one totally reasonable tweet!” but Shor (who I guess was having some sort of psychotic break) responded to this by dropping his trousers and taking a big dump on the boss’s desk. Certainly if that turns out to be the case then I think all sympathy for Shor would rapidly evaporate.
Alternatively, maybe Shor is a well-meaning liberal who took a job at “Civis Analytics” under the impression that it was some sort of bland data science consulting company, but then to his horror discovered that his new employer is really a sinister evil SPECTRE-like criminal crypto-fascist conspiracy to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! But, before Shor could go public with this shocking knowledge, the head of so-called Civis Analytics (“Number One”) arranged to manufacture this absurd controversy to discredit Shor and somehow brand him as a racist. Now, Shor is a man on the run, outwitting mysterious assassins and outrunning fireballs and playing eleven-dimensional chess in order to publicize the truth, assisted only by a mysterious and beautiful woman (who may or may not be what she seems to be)!!! (It’s like QAnon for liberal free-speech supporters!) When it’s all over, he’ll probably get a gold medal from Congress and we’ll be building statues of the guy.
Arguments are way more fun if everyone can just make up new facts (or just insinuate that facts exist) to support their position!
Great! According to this, the company said "We have not, nor would we ever, terminate employees for tweeting academic papers. These rumors are incorrect and unsubstantiated. Civis was founded on the principles of free speech and the pursuit of truth through objective scientific research, and that has not changed. This is an internal personnel matter, and out of respect for our employees and alumni, we won’t be commenting further.”
So, who to believe? Random people on Twitter, or the company that actually did the firing?
So, who to believe: People with no vested interest in the controversy, or the company that fired someone (and is now being criticized for it)?
Oh, and from your source:
So, maybe Civis Analytics does fire people for tweeting academic papers.
Maybe there is “more to the story”. This is precisley why the open letter did NOT cite specific cases, but just made statements about general principles of free speech. It’s worth noting though, that some of the people in this thread seem to be saying that Shor’s firing was perfectly reasonable even if the facts are as alleged by random people on Twitter the articles in The Atlantic and New York magazine.
Well, the reason I liked the article that I linked to is because it is addressed to the companies themselves. I personally don’t think his firing was reasonable, but I don’t blame people who objected to his tweet nor those who called it to the attention of his company. It’s such a ridiculous reason to fire someone, that something additional MUST have gone on with the firing.
I DO blame people who called the tweet to the attention of his company. The ONLY reason to have done that (“Come get your boy”) was to try to get Shor fired. If the firing wasn’t reasonable, then it’s not reasonable to have attempted to get him fired in the first place.
I’ve never found this version of the “argument from personal incredulity” to be very convincing. It doesn’t work when it’s from a religious fundamentalist (“But that so-called contradiction in the text of Holy Scripture is SO blatant and obvious that there MUST be some other explanation!”) and I don’t think it works here either.
I said that I personally don’t find it reasonable. Perhaps those other people DO find it reasonable? I think whoever thinks he should have been fired is more than welcome to let his company know that. I think his company is unreasonable in firing him.
I do think that what has happened of recent is that the sort of people who used to suffer economic consequences of their wrong behavior (admitting you were gay or, in some areas in the South, didn’t believe in God, for examples) now have realized that they can turn the tables using capitalism. Companies tend to not want to lose any business, so if they figure that a boycott may happen due to an employee’s behavior, they may just cut loose the employee in order to make money.
So perhaps it’s a bit of social media that is making this more obvious, but a lot of it is capitalism’s effects of companies erring really hard on the side of tolerance to avoid loss of revenue (and I guess it’s been calculated that any counter boycott won’t be as damning to the bottom line as the initial boycott).
Of course, companies may indeed decide to say no, we don’t think the person did anything wrong and we’ll take any minor financial hit. Though generally it’s because a CEO does something. Chick-Fil-A comes to mind (and I think they made money, at least in the short term, from right-leaning Christians coming to support them).