Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company:
1) don't allow any activism in the company
2) allow ALL types of activism in the company
Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
It’s way worse than that. Even centrists and liberals are silenced by the vocal mob for merely questioning the validity of certain policies or initiatives that claim to have some righteous sounding goal, even when there is evidence that the proposed policy is more likely to be harmful than helpful. For example, it should not be controversial to debate the merits of Black Lives Matter, but since the alternate reality that certain people want to project doesn’t hold up well against facts and data, it’s easier just to brand you a racist (or whatever-ist, depending on the topic) instead. There is a ton of self-censorship and coercion by these activists asserting their supposed moral authority, which is not a good road to go down.
In an industry full of data scientists and engineers, it amazes me how people go along with this narrative that disparate outcomes among members of arbitrary group identities is evidence of discrimination. We know that is not a valid application of statistics, yet people who know better still keep repeating it.
Not only will you be viciously attacked for questioning BLM, but an open source maintainer at Facebook was publicly attacked by coworkers for politely declining a request to put a BLM banner on the website for an open source project (he stated he wanted to remain apolitical, without giving an opinion).
Social advocacy is a spiritual replacement to religion and supporters are even more fervent.
It depends on if your use of BLM means "lives of those of African-decent matter" or "the Black Lives Matter movement/group".
Personally i would expect the former to have more widespread support in America. The latter stands for many things that could be more controversial in the states. A DuckDuckGo for "blm demands"[0] returns the following NPR piece[1] from DC-based interviews. It lists BLM demands as:
- Defund Police
- No New Jails
- Decriminalize Sex Work
- Police-Free Schools
- Drop Charges Against Protesters
- End Cash Bail In Maryland
- Ban Stop And Frisk
That any race matters more than any other race. If someone put "X Lives Matter" on a t-shirt, where X is any other race, they would be attacked, or at least fired from their job.
Similarly, you can go to work wearing a blue Biden hat, and nothing would happen. However, if you went to work wearing a red Trump hat, it might be your last day at work.
THIS is why it’s so insidious. BLM is a well funded political organization with self-described marxist founders. It has about as much to do with black lives as the Nazi party had to do with “national socialism”.
Nobody thinks black lives don’t matter. This is very different from supporting BLM, however. Many prominent black public figures have come out denouncing BLM, and it isn’t because they think their own lives don’t matter.
The name is purely orwellian PR trickery that you can’t argue with, just like “antifa” is. It’s a remarkably effective tactic because most people assume it just means what the words say.
Do companies have an obligation to be democratic? Are democratic companies common?
Protected classes aside, if I start a company I can choose to hire or exclude whomever I choose. I could start a company that only hires registered Republicans, or only people who can't stand the taste of bananas. If this turns out to be a bad business decision (which it probably is), the market will punish me and I'll eventually lose to smarter competitors. Right?
I didn't realize that, you are likely correct! I could start such a company in my state, but I'd have to be very careful with jurisdictions. In practice most companies I'm familiar with have official policies banning political discrimination across the board, which makes sense considering the importance of California in tech.
I actually find it quite curious that you’re not allowed to discriminate based on religion, but allowed to discriminate based on political views, throughout the West.
One is a freely chosen personal belief, and the other is a freely chosen personal belief.
You can't discriminate against certain protected classes, but yes, it boggles my mind a little bit that someone could think "a corporation" is anything other than one of the most authoritarian, top-down governance structures ever devised.
If it's voluntarily formed, it's not authoritarian.
When a political faction deems that those who refuse to pay half their income for a highly benevolent social program, will face punitive legal consequences, that is authoritarian. I only bring this up because I suspect you are in support of these kinds of programs.
Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd.
Slavery is disappearing, thank heaven! and, on the other hand, our disposition to defend our property prevents direct and open plunder from being easy.
One thing, however, remains - it is the original inclination which exists in all men to divide the lot of life into two parts, throwing the trouble upon others, and keeping the satisfaction for themselves. It remains to be shown under what new form this sad tendency is manifesting itself.
The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. No, our conscience has become too sensitive for that. The tyrant and his victim are still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the State - that is, the Law itself.
Why is it a fact? I'm independent, so I usually let the other two sides battle it out among themselves, while I stand by and am usually quite impressed by the sophisticated and clever arguments going both ways. I have yet to be swayed either way. Still, it's interesting!
In a way it's an optimization. My hope is that one day, when the two sides have finally come to a conclusion as to which one is right, I can join that one, and save myself a lot of trouble in the meantime ;)
Where do you draw the line on what is political? Is wearing a mask political? What about calling someone by their preferred pronoun, or recognizing gay marriage?
Me too. I can't see why staying in my comfort zone is regarded as political. One solution is to just get comfy. No politics involved, just plain survivalism, nothing wrong.
It’s political because a number of hugely important issues call us all to action (child poverty, climate change, homelessness) and those issues are and will continue to put vulnerable people in danger of death and suffering. Staying in your comfort zone is likely an expression of indifference to them as vanishingly few people are comfortable when tackling these problems.
You might adopt a political position that your privileged position of safety and comfort is not subject to any particular obligations to engage with others and become involved in society’s problems, but that would be politics all the same.
I actually agree with you. My comment was provocative in the sense that I would surely immediately become engaged politically if I was out of this comfort zone.
This is getting down-voted but honestly I agree. Silence is a professional courtesy when it comes to certain ideas. For instance, I don't talk about how I find certain parts of 4chan incredibly hilarious. As a black man, I'd definitely have co-workers blow up if I mentioned this at work - granted they feel more than entitled to talk about all sorts of things that I wouldn't even talk about if I was at a bar with friends (fringe lefty politics and sexually explicit things).
I feel this. As someone who grew up in the 4chan hey-day, the internet I fell in love with was extremely inappropriate and anarchic. Shooting the shit about whatever inane thing 4chan was going on about were the source of hilarious and open conversations we used to have amongst friends. Don't get me wrong, 4chan is wrong, messed up, socially deviant and not something to look up to. But all the people I know who used to browse that crazy site ended up being normal, well adjusted people. The social climate is so tense nowadays I would never think to talk about good old 4chan openly.
It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention.
This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
It makes me really angry that they would do this.
It makes me really sad that it worked.
I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.
The reality is thar vast majority of those who do not support the BLM movement are not at all racist. I believe that this movement has made our society more racist and divided than it was before.
I’m responding to “I believe that this movement has made our society more racist and divided than it was before.”
Effectively this means the parent thinks that no movement should be made at all, ergo the status quo should continue.
You can debate the merits of the demands that BLM puts forth but how on earth is this not implying that the protests in response to police killings are making society more racist?
>This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
One of my favorite things about this new type of political activism is that words no longer mean what we all understood them to mean in ages past. "Explicit" would mean something along the lines of Coinbase or Armstrong saying "we support the status quo of American racism", as you have alleged. Alas, I've read all these blog posts and there is no sentence that matches or even could be remotely construed to resemble the one you have wrote.
Context matters. When you say to someone, for example, that you're going to do X unless they object, and they stand silent, then their silence is, in that instance, interpreted as explicit consent for you to do X in many legal circumstances.
A good example recently from current events was the US president being asked in a press conference to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, "win, lose, or draw". He responded with "we'll have to see what happens". In the context of the question being posed, that's a clear and explicit failure to commit, given that context.
Context can entirely invert the meaning of two identical statements, and, in the right context, a failure to do a certain thing, or even remaining silent, can indeed be an explicit statement.
Another case comes from 2013, Salinas v Texas, when the police were questioning a murder suspect who suddenly became quiet during questioning when the topic turned to the murder. They were able to use this sudden silence as incriminating circumstantial evidence, given that specific context. This resulted in silence in the face of questioning by the government having to be explicitly invoked as such to not be potentially incriminating, which is an odd state of affairs and probably not the best outcome, but you can however tell that those judges weren't completely insane. Silence after saying "I affirmatively invoke my right to remain silent" is very different than silence after you were just answering police questions voluntarily, until they asked you about a murder they thought you committed.
Silence can speak volumes, explicitly, given the circumstances preceding and surrounding that silence.
Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, once said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
Of course context matters, but you're still conflating or redefining words here. Each of your examples is an example of implicit agreement, not explicit, because of the context provided. That's what context does ... it allows you to make an inference about how people are feeling or thinking about a certain topic when they don't explicitly say so. Your inference may be right, but it may also be wrong.
If in your parent comment you had accused Coinbase/Armstrong of implicitly supporting the status quo (as you define it) I would've said "yeah, sure, if I squint hard enough and wash it through the 'silence is violence' filters I can see how you'd think that".
Another troubling thing I want to point out here is your comment is part of an accelerating trend where people, particularly from but not limited to those on the left, consistently attribute maximum malice of intent to peoples' comments (said and unsaid) or their actions. That is, imo, one of the reasons these environments are so toxic, because people are immediately put on the defensive.
I think this very view is likely what made the coinbase workplace so toxic and uninviting. "Black lives matter" is a statement that everyone already agrees with. "Black Lives Matter" is a political organization with political objectives, including the de-emphasis of the nuclear family, socialist economics, and explicit financial funnelling to the Democrat party.
It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you reject BLM for its bad politics, you reject that black lives matter. And if you accept it, you also accept a bunch of other shit you're not actually for.
BLM should be recognized for the moral "package deal" that it is, and vehemently rejected. It's dishonest.
It's not Coinbase that is conflating anything, BLM itself is a conflation of ideas.
Oh come on. Have you ever tried to find one person who actually, literally believes that the lives of black people do not matter?
You'll certainly find 11-year olds in Call of Duty who will say it for shits and giggles to control you; you won't find anybody who actually believes it.
I personally know dozens of people who don't care at all about black lives one way or the other. I've seen hundreds more that I don't know personally demonstrate that belief publicly, many of them police officers.
The disparities in policing, application of police violence, and prosecution are well-documented.
This is why the movement exists. It's a real problem, whether you personally have experienced it or not, whether you personally wish to acknowledge it or not.
There are many people out there who simply do not think that it matters whether or not black people live or die. Many of them are in uniform.
