Thanks for the gracious acceptance of my apology, you unrepentant fascist!
But seriously, again, I’m sorry for misunderstanding your comment, and I appreciate your understanding where my misunderstanding came from. I thought your comments about voting were thoughtful, empathetic, and non-partisan. This is a good example of how easy it is to misunderstand our ideological/partisan opponents. Sorry I did that, and thanks for seeing why I did.
PS: For podcast people who would like to hear people from the US left and right talk over issues in a non-acrimonious way, I’m going to recommend “With Friends like These.” With Friends Like These on Apple Podcasts Ana Marie Cox is a lefty feminist recovering alcoholic Christian who talks to ideological opponents in an engaging and compassionate way. I feel like we are losing public examples of how to engage with people we disagree with politically, and Cox is doing a great and innovative job of modeling how we can do that in the future. (If there’s an example of a similar show with a conservative host, let me know!)
While true now, that thinking process is largely the problem. We can’t treat racist ideologies differently. We can’t treat ideologies that are pro-discrimination for protected classes differently than those that are not. We can’t acknowledge that bigotry is wrong and actually make laws against it.
But since this isn’t a freedom of speech issue, we actually can. We could have your protection laws, but put hate speech and discrimination as exceptions.
I’m all for there being more restrictions on at will employment. I hate how people are disposable while the amoral (at best) companies are the fixtures. I’m all for workers rights. But I’m also very much opposed to racism, sexism, or other bigotry, and have no desire to see that made harder to punish.
And I reject those who say there isn’t a real problem here. You were all complaining about at will employment before, as we liberals tend to do. The disposable worker is one of our bugaboos. adaher’s proposal is quite left-wing.
With exceptions for racism/sexism/bigotry (which already exist in a lot of government jobs that have worker protections), I could get behind this.
Okay, but what do you think of the situation in the OP, the professor who said that Harvey hitting Texas was karma. While quite offensive, it also strikes me as political speech that does not involve bigotry or discrimination. Frankly, I don’t much care about white supremacists. It’s all the non-white supremacists that are getting caught up in what seems to be becoming a normal political tactic.
I just don’t think that finding out where someone works so that you can intimidate the employer into firing them is an appropriate way to conduct political discourse. If someone does something as a representative of a company, that’s fine, but if you actually have to go to the trouble of finding out where someone works, you’re just wrong.
Also, on its face, this guy’s statement sounds like he was using satire to make fun of people’s claims that “acts of God” are actually punishment for the bad behaviors of people. You know, like when Katrina was blamed on the immorality of New Orleans.
Possibly, although he continued to argue his point as if it was serious to people who responded to him. Still, I don’t consider being offensive off duty to be a firing offense. No evidence has been presented that Storey hates Republicans, or Texans, or that he’s ever mistreated either in his classrooms. The firing is completely unjustified, and if a picket starts in Tampa to protest his firing, I’m joining it. Maybe our first step should be to fight fire with fire. Take down the names and employers of the angry mob members who advocate firings for offensive comments and then get them fired when they make an ill-considered Twitter statement. Let those who judge be judged by their own standards and punished by their own preferred methods.
Your argument is nonsense. Even you acknowledge that more lefties are getting fired than righties. So why would the left like this tool? Your own posts can’t support your argument.
This is just another example of right wing snowflakes wanting special treatment.
Oh crap. Just for shits and giggles I responded to someone on Twitter who called for Storey’s firing, saying that those who demand firings for offensive comments will themselves be monitored for offensive comments and their employers informed.
Took them five minutes to delete their account. I think I might have made someone shit their pants. Maybe this is fun! No, actually it sucks and I feel bad for doing it, even if turnabout is fair play.
You should feel a bit bad about that, I am not sure about the legal aspects either, but from what I’ve been hearing on these boards, if you had carried out your threat, it would not have been.
That’s a completely different medium than going out in public and carrying a swastika, begin identified for carrying a swastika flag in public, and losing your job because your employer doesn’t want nazis working for them.
You threatened to go out of your way to identify a twitter user specifically in order to interfere with their employment.
Outa curiosity, how would your boss feel about your posts here?
Didn’t actually make a specific threat. More of a “judge not lest you be judged” type statement that caused the twitterer to panic.
The twitterer in question did not have an anoymous identity, so no doxxing involved.
But for what it’s worth, I scared myself and won’t be doing that again. And I now feel even more strongly that going after people’s employers for their online behavior is despicable. How do those people sleep at night?
I agree. I’m Pro-employer on this one. The guy mentioned in the OP was not fired for voicing his opinion, but rather for voicing his opinion in a way that would adversely affect his employer’s reputation and ability to do business. If someone spouts foolishness over the internet and brings scorn to his employer, is the employer just supposed to suffer?
Oh please. Professors say controversial shit all the time. Colleges are as immune from such economic pressures as you can get. University of Tampa wasn’t going to lose a dime because of Storey’s statement.
But you know what, let’s test it in court. Let U of T prove that they were at risk of losing business due to Prof. Storey. They couldn’t. You know why? Because it takes a special kind of idiot to believe that Prof. Storey is representing University of Tampa while tweeting at home.
And let’s be clear here. Did Tampa REALLY want to fire hime? Would they have even considered it in the absence of his tweet going viral? Assumedly Prof. Storey has other Tampa professers following him, so there’s no way that his employer wouldn’t have known about the tweet.
It wasn’t his employer who fired him. It was the bastards who wanted him to suffer because they didn’t like what he said that fired him.
Perhaps he got fired because Tampa doesn’t want people who say idiotic things on their payroll?
Or perhaps Tampa should have some nerve and not fire someone just because a few people are upset? They simply have to wait a week until the next outrageous thing occurs and then most people will forget.
I still disagree that ALL speech should be protected from employer consequences.
Count me in this group as well. It can definitely be abused, but the right to fire a Nazi should be absolute. (Personally, I think there should be a bounty on them, but that’s another topic.)
Ideally, if I wanted to disassociate from someone for their unsavory conduct or expression, I should do so because that is what I deem right. Not just to get out from under a concerted campaign to harass me for associating with him (and even less to prevent a hypothetical one). I should hope both my moral compass AND society’s point rightly in the same general direction.
But at the same time I recognize that sometimes the angry mob will be just a mob out to bully and I’ll be bravely standing on principle, but, other times they may have a point and I just fail to get it from my privilege.
Given my druthers, as an employer I would not fire someone for wearing a MAGA hat or a Free Mumia t-shirt to the market on their day off, or even for having dressed in blackface at a frat party 20 years ago, or posting to a brony slashfic board However, goose-step down the street with torches shouting white power slogans, make a video pledging allegiance to the IS caliphate, or open a chapter of NAMBLA and you’ll be shown the door. The question is where is the inflection point and, more to the point of the thread, should there be one that is enforceable.
Interesting info. A lot of the info-less opinions are also interesting but mainly just measuring which way the wind is blowing. The frequent left leaning posters are almost all against any such statutes (also seeming not to realize they already exist some places). With all due respect to everyone, I take that more as a sign they think the left can promote its causes by hounding right leaning statements out of more and more places than it is a reflection what business friendly guys/gals they are. Note, I’m not say right leaning people (in forums where they weren’t such a small minority) wouldn’t act the same if there was more of a feeling on the right that the shoe was on the other foot.
I’m fairly ambivalent about this. But I’d say state level legislation is the way to go if it’s done, ‘laboratories of democracy’, you see over time what is is too ‘burdensome’ to business by companies moving out or new ones not establishing themselves there. I’m basically skeptical of the national political system deciding what’s ‘burdensome’ regulation at the margin. Which doesn’t mean I’m against any federal level regulation, which has the countervailing advantage of being uniform. But if lots of people disagree what’s ‘burdensome’, state level can be better, so you can actually compare and see how ‘burdensome’ it turns out.
And I’m also ambivalent about the basic need for statutory augmentation of free expression rights as proposed. But things are changing, interaction of changing society and technology. It’s seems there are now more witch hunts to drive out what I view as reasonable non-left views (the Brendan Eich gay marriage thing and recent Google firing come to mind) by attacking people’s livelihood. It could happen in terms of left leaning comments too, like the professor’s mentioned, though in that case a bit different in that it seems to be satire, or else really stupid if totally serious. Anyway depending whether this trend increases or is kept in check by countervailing social pressure, such legislation might be appropriate or not, IMO.
Nazi’s/white supremacists OTOH remain a red herring for the most part. Anytime that’s the example given time and again, it’s a good rule of thumb people are blowing smoke.
No, he’s saying you can’t be punished for private words/beliefs.
“A thoughtcrime is an Orwellian neologism used to describe an illegal thought. The term was popularized in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, first published in 1949, wherein thoughtcrime is the criminal act of holding unspoken beliefs or doubts that oppose or question Ingsoc, the ruling party. In the book, the government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects. To entertain unacceptable thoughts is known as crimethink in Newspeak, the ideologically purified dialect of the party.”
Thoughtcrime is basically de facto with the rise of social media. It just isn’t du jure.
However, goose-step down the street with torches shouting white power slogans, make a video pledging allegiance to the IS caliphate, or open a chapter of NAMBLA and you’ll be shown the door. The question is where is the inflection point and, more to the point of the thread, should there be one that is enforceable.