Mozilla CEO Wants To Fire Employees Who Express Anti-SJW Sentiments On Reddit
So...this is batshit insane, is it not?
Talkcrime on the interwebs is now grounds for termination of employment at Mozilla according to CEO Chris Beard.
I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise after the Brendan Eich incident.
So neither of the two defenses liberals have used of these wackos ((a) they're not wrong and (b) they're wrong but they have no influence/power) seems very plausible anymore.
Oh and:
This isn't an aberration. This is a paradigmatic strategy of political correctness. It's exactly the sort of thing they did in the '80's and '90's, and it's exactly why sane people (finally!) realized how insane it all was. But here it is again, ascendant...and once again liberals are defending it. And not merely defending it, accepting it.
But, hey. Maybe Chairman Beard will be merciful if he's actually able to dox /u/aioyama. Maybe he'll just send him to re-education camp instead of actually terminating him.
Talkcrime on the interwebs is now grounds for termination of employment at Mozilla according to CEO Chris Beard.
I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise after the Brendan Eich incident.
So neither of the two defenses liberals have used of these wackos ((a) they're not wrong and (b) they're wrong but they have no influence/power) seems very plausible anymore.
Oh and:
The Reddit user welcomed Koehler's exit. "Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything," the user wrote. "When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief." It was that remark that appeared to trigger Beard's warning today. "When I talk about crossing the line from criticism to hate speech, I'm talking about when you start saying 'someone's kind doesn't belong here, and we'll all be happy when they're gone.'"So "When she and the rest of her blue-haired, nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief" becomes spun into [her] kind doesn't belong here, which is something something "hate speech."
This isn't an aberration. This is a paradigmatic strategy of political correctness. It's exactly the sort of thing they did in the '80's and '90's, and it's exactly why sane people (finally!) realized how insane it all was. But here it is again, ascendant...and once again liberals are defending it. And not merely defending it, accepting it.
But, hey. Maybe Chairman Beard will be merciful if he's actually able to dox /u/aioyama. Maybe he'll just send him to re-education camp instead of actually terminating him.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:07 PM
5 Comments:
Where we agree:
1) This isn't a hate crime and calling it such is ridiculous
2) In an ideal world, corporations shouldn't fire people for posting insulting stuff about their co-workers (present or former) on the internet.
Where we disagree:
1) In the world we live in, people get fired for this stuff all the time. I don't see why we should particularly care about this particular guy instead of, say, Steven Salaita
2) The solution to this problem (people getting fired for off-the-job speech) is not to place all the blame on one type of speech that is getting people fired, but to improve worker protections for all types of speech
But to be honest, I'm not sure we're going to see eye-to-eye here (as we often don't), because interpreting "When she and the rest of her blue-haired, nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief" as "[her] kind doesn't belong here" seems like a pretty straightforward graf. If you don't think that's the sentiment the reddit poster was trying to get across with that comment, I'd be curious to hear what you thought they were going for.
Extremely fair and reasonable, cb.
Gotta think about your points.
Does the public nature of the comments matter? I mean, I can talk about how big of an asshole my boss is when I'm at home or with friends... But posting statements publicly on Reddit, Facebook, etc seems to violate some basic decorum.
If I'm a business owner, I'm not sure I want people working for me who publicly and uncivily bash their coworkers...I don't want those people representing my company...is that wrong?
Yeah, I have to agree that the statement isn't being spun into something it's not when it's interpreted as "her kind doesn't belong here" since the statement "her blue-haired, nose-pierced asshole feminists" pretty much establishes a kind of person of which she is a part and for which the author does not care...
The problem is, that statement follows this one: "Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything"
That's not an unreasonable way to state the relevant facts here, and it certainly is a description which indicates a particular kind of asshole that's been annoying you (us) lately, so it's likely that you (we) start reading this article inclined to agree with the complainant. Tack on to that the stupid reaction by the Mozilla CEO in calling it "hate speech" (again, typical of that particular kind of asshole) and we're going to be even further driven to side with the complainant...
And so we might think: if she really is part of a group of blue-haired, nose-pierced asshole feminists, I guess the truth is a defense...
But while it's hard to tell if the speaker is exhibiting an irrational prejudice against nose piercings and blue hair or if he's just pissed off at this girl and lashing out at her using a description of her more immediately obvious and distinct physical characteristics, it's certainly an unprofessional thing to do either way.
Given that aoiyama clearly implies he's a Mozilla employee and that he's in the know regarding the REAL opinion of Christie Koehler held by "everyone" at the organization, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that an offense worthy of disciplinary action from management if the account owner is identified. Airing one's grievances in such a way as to foster what I balk at calling a hostile workplace, but certainly a shitty one, is unprofessional and bad for the organization.
At the risk of sounding too middle-management-y, if I were his manager and he were to identify himself to me, I'd definitely inform him that such behavior isn't acceptable and that I'm concerned for a workforce which bands together and mutters retaliatory cruelty behind the backs of other employees rather than figuring out how to resolve conflicts and move past them.
And outside of that issue, if she really is that particular kind of asshole, giving her anything but a factually accurate, mercilessly precise verbal beatdown is exactly what must be avoided. You don't spout off against blue hair and nose piercings against someone who's permanently offended at everything; that's just serving up a silver-platter-based opportunity for her to claim your words as evidence of actual irrational prejudice which she's fantasized about facing all along.
I guess the conclusion I'm drawing is: there is no real defense for aoiyama, here.
Sorry, haven't had time to respond:
Yeah, yeah, yeah...I realized that I was being a hack when I steamrolled over the interpretation of what was written with "Your kind is not welcome here."
Absolutely my bad, and I knew it was BS when I wrote it.
I'll throw this out there, though: I had a thought similar to the Mystics: "Your kind is not welcome here" seems to me to be a somewhat contentious gloss, because it's paradigmatically used to pick out and pick on somebody because of some morally irrelevant characteristic they have, e.g. race. Or so it seems to me. But what the person is complaining about isn't morally irrelevant. It's fabricating charges of racism. Like the Mystic, I saw the stuff about blue hair etc. as just being pissed. Look, people near and dear to me have nose piercings and blue (etc.) hair. For the record, I've got nothing against that stuff...
I do think that a lot about this turns on the truth of the charges. If the blue-haired person in question *was* commonly "seeing" racism where it wasn't, then it's hard to complain about people saying this, and being happy to see her go. OTOH if she was pointing out real and significant actual racism, then the complaint is unreasonable.
In academia, I see more charges of the imaginary variety than the veridical variety...but YMMV.
I'm currently on the warpath about imaginary racism and the professionally outraged activists and *de facto* activists that imagine it. Which in no way means that I have any interest in minimizing actual racism.
That should go without saying.
Anyway: guilty as charged, with a gesture at a mitigating point.
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