Also, I see what you're saying with regard to right (or lack thereof) to a job but it calls into question the constitutionality of what these agencies are doing. Can they threaten to apply facially constitutional laws in arguably unconstitutional ways that result in third parties sanctioning people?
Im not saying theres a simple correct answer to that but it does bother me and it seems like it could have a real chilling effect on legitimate exercise of rights.
Part of this is my error because I should have qualified with 'outside the work place.'
Even then the part you're missing is that 'hostile work environment' is a legal term of art. No one is ever actually establishing in court that the conduct in question is in fact creating a hostile work environment as that term is defined by the law. Instead companies are firing people for saying or writing (even on their own time) anything even remotely controversial to avoid anyone even raising the question or sparking an investigation, in large part because enforcement agencies are regularly issuing guidance which is a nice way of saying threats about how they're willing to enforce. Thats where I think there's a problem.
Without getting into the content of what Damore said, what if the alleged hostile work environment is being created by constitutionally protected speech? And further, what if the government is never really being required to test that issue because companies will fire people rather than risk a complaint?
My reference to 'the libertarians' was a joking response to Saul, it was not an endorsement of any particular argument.
You may be misreading me but that doesn't mean we necessarily agree. Google (and other corporations) do what they do because of the enforcement environment. There's more to this than social norms. Legislatures don't have to make laws prohibiting certain speech if administrative agencies are interpreting simple non-discrimination laws in extremely broad ways then threatening enforcement based on those interpretations. Companies predictably go in full throttle to cover their asses and avoid any type of controversy no matter how stupid.
So yes, the state isnt prosecuting for wrongthink but its setting incentives for third parties to sanction people for it.
My view is that rights don't matter very much if exercising them risks your livelihood (another spot where I tend to disagree with libertarians) which is where we are going and the government very much has a hand in it.
I apparently missed the conversation and so I won't rehash it. All I'd respond with is that if we are at the point where questioning the efficacy of a law and the way private entities are interpreting it is enough to get you fired due to concerns about violating said laws then the libertarians aren't as full of shit as some people would have us believe.
That's where the governmemt's role comes into play in this. No one wants to deal with EEOC complaints and investigations by federal and state enforcement entities. To tie it back to the OP, you get some person who feels that the content being hosted is offensive and they've got the ability to cause a headache of paperwork and outside counsel fees even for pretty meritless complaints. The incentive is to stamp out anything that could possibly rub anyone the wrong way and its only getting worse with the broadening and ever more subjectice array of speech deemed offensive.
Its possible that one day the Mathew Princes if the world won't need to arbitrarily shut down content. They'll do it because their lawyers advised them to.
Good post, Will. Having taken the time last evening to read Google Guy's post that got him fired I find this more disturbing than I otherwise would be inclined to. Now I get that some of these types of complaints boil down to 'its unfair that I can't use racial slurs or make lewd remarks to my female colleagues' but what James Damore wrote wasn't anywhere close to that. The fact that its being treated and reported on as though it was shows just how far down the rabbit hole we've gone.a
The First Amendment is all well and good but at the end of the day corporate compliance departments and internet mobs are quite capable of doing damage to the norms of open debate. This is especially so as what is deemed offensive becomes broader and broader and ideologue bureaucrats in the government put their fingers on the scales with arbitrary guidance and audit/enforcement threats. Even though they lack the force of law its enough to create a sort of ruthless culture of CYA. I know all about it since part of my job as an in house lawyer is to help build it.
I won't miss the Daily Stormer anymore than I'll miss some of the racist trash thats been pulled from Amazon. However at some point we need to ask where all of this is going. I'm not sure its some place good.
Apologies on the error in attribution (same to you @leeesq ). And yea, as hard as it is to imagine that there are people out there who aren't following every political development so they can eagerly go debate it I must concede that they do exist and vastly outnumber the likes of OTers.
I think your analysis is fair and largely accurate. The caveat to me is that there's a strategic trade off that comes with abandoning civility and crying wolf all the time and thats what we are seeing. Freddie has written a lot about this.
Maybe what I'm about to say is Pollyanna-ish but I think a large plurality of white people, even those with some latent racism or conservative views do not support the political vision of sieg heiling neo-nazis. What you're going to have trouble with is getting them to make common cause against racist groups when the perception is that they'd be standing with the type of Calvinist (to use your phrasing) SJWs on college campuses and elsewhere we've been talking so much about lately.
I don't think your average person sees this as small-l liberalism of the kind our Republic was founded on versus fascism. They see it as crazy/stupid versus stupid/crazy.
I think you're mostly right, but it's worth looking at why this might not seem totally clear cut, even to people analyzing it in good faith. I agree that you don't get to go goosestepping around with the flag of Nazi Germany then say your message isn't related to the things Nazi Germany stood for. They have to own that and any equivocation is pathetic and helps prove what cowards they are.
What confuses this is that it happened in a college town where the protest culture is now heavily intermingled with the intersectionaly cult. We don't really know what the counter protesters stood for. To the extent its opposing racism and the ideology of the Third Reich they should be applauded. To the extent its related to intersectionality one side really isn't much better than the other in this context. They both share the same assumptions about race, their preferred heirarchies are just different. In that regard I can't think of two groups more deserving of each other.
@maribou I do understand why people are upset by it and I don't at all want to appear as though I don't sympathize with those who are afraid. The images are very disturbing and its exacerbated by our mass media culture that profits on fear and panic. Its when things like this happen that I think its most important to try to stay grounded in reason.
I mentioned the 90s as well, my point was that these things have been going on for a long time. Doesn't make it good, does mean we need perspective. Like with Skokie, it sounds like there have been arrests in Charlottesville, including of the murder suspect. I'm also not sure I buy your numbers logic. We are still talking about very insignificant numbers of people.
I'd have to look into the argument that these are more violent than past events. I'm open to the possibility that they are but haven't seen any evidence making the case.
The people who voted for him do have agency and I think there's a lot of worthy ridicule to be dished out (I'll be laying some on my dad later this evening). The same can be said for the right wing media outlets that turned him into a politician.
What scares me is losing perspective in comforting myths about who we are really up against. The parallels arent exact but it reminds me of the conservatives who had their own comforting myths about Obama being in league with Saul Alinsky inspired terrorists or the New Black Panthers keeping people from voting. The country collectively went through it with Islamic terrorism after 9/11.
In a group of 300 million you can find plenty of people with out there and downright crazy beliefs. Maybe the Trump presidency has emboldebed some nutty people (no one seems to have hard evidence of that). What we shouldn't do is mistake them as the cause of our various policy failures and other social and political problems.
You're incorrect on the facts. There have been periodic white supremacist marches and other protests in this country for years, most of which are as small as they are dumb. You can google "1990's kkk rallies" and find lots of news articles. There's also of course Skokie back in 1977. You can see pictures here at this retrospective on the court case:
Has anyone done an official estimate of how many protesters were actually there? Burt says "thousands" but I keep seeing hundreds which is more consistent with what it looks like in the pictures. Just an example:
On Friday night, hundreds of white nationalists carrying torches and chanting "white lives matter," "you will not replace us," and the Nazi-associated phrase "blood and soil" marched near a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University of Virginia, and were met by counterprotesters.
I worry that by treating the types of buffoons that 20 years ago got paraded on the Jerry Springer show for laughs as a threat far outside their numbers, popularity, or electoral significance justify we're creating a kind of al-Qaeda effect. Instead of rolling our eyes at the freak show and removing the statue as planned we've sent in CNN with breathless coverage and a megaphone. The worst outcome would be swelling their numbers by creating cause for fools and alienated people who want to lash out, and for whom the details of their professed ideology an afterthought.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Men Who Can Kick You Off The Internet”
Also, I see what you're saying with regard to right (or lack thereof) to a job but it calls into question the constitutionality of what these agencies are doing. Can they threaten to apply facially constitutional laws in arguably unconstitutional ways that result in third parties sanctioning people?
Im not saying theres a simple correct answer to that but it does bother me and it seems like it could have a real chilling effect on legitimate exercise of rights.
"
@nevermoor
I had not heard of that case but you habe definitely put it on my radar.
"
Part of this is my error because I should have qualified with 'outside the work place.'
Even then the part you're missing is that 'hostile work environment' is a legal term of art. No one is ever actually establishing in court that the conduct in question is in fact creating a hostile work environment as that term is defined by the law. Instead companies are firing people for saying or writing (even on their own time) anything even remotely controversial to avoid anyone even raising the question or sparking an investigation, in large part because enforcement agencies are regularly issuing guidance which is a nice way of saying threats about how they're willing to enforce. Thats where I think there's a problem.
"
@doctor-jay
Without getting into the content of what Damore said, what if the alleged hostile work environment is being created by constitutionally protected speech? And further, what if the government is never really being required to test that issue because companies will fire people rather than risk a complaint?
To me thats the big issue here.
"
Its a personal problem I have apparentlty.
"
My reference to 'the libertarians' was a joking response to Saul, it was not an endorsement of any particular argument.
You may be misreading me but that doesn't mean we necessarily agree. Google (and other corporations) do what they do because of the enforcement environment. There's more to this than social norms. Legislatures don't have to make laws prohibiting certain speech if administrative agencies are interpreting simple non-discrimination laws in extremely broad ways then threatening enforcement based on those interpretations. Companies predictably go in full throttle to cover their asses and avoid any type of controversy no matter how stupid.
So yes, the state isnt prosecuting for wrongthink but its setting incentives for third parties to sanction people for it.
My view is that rights don't matter very much if exercising them risks your livelihood (another spot where I tend to disagree with libertarians) which is where we are going and the government very much has a hand in it.
"
I understand why google did it and I think my post makes clear that I understand why they did it.
I also have no objection to unionization in the private sector and I'm not sure why you would assume that I do.
"
@saul-degraw
I apparently missed the conversation and so I won't rehash it. All I'd respond with is that if we are at the point where questioning the efficacy of a law and the way private entities are interpreting it is enough to get you fired due to concerns about violating said laws then the libertarians aren't as full of shit as some people would have us believe.
"
Sounds like a tragedy all around.
"
That's where the governmemt's role comes into play in this. No one wants to deal with EEOC complaints and investigations by federal and state enforcement entities. To tie it back to the OP, you get some person who feels that the content being hosted is offensive and they've got the ability to cause a headache of paperwork and outside counsel fees even for pretty meritless complaints. The incentive is to stamp out anything that could possibly rub anyone the wrong way and its only getting worse with the broadening and ever more subjectice array of speech deemed offensive.
Its possible that one day the Mathew Princes if the world won't need to arbitrarily shut down content. They'll do it because their lawyers advised them to.
"
The question itself is a microaggression. Your account has been suspended and your employer, the local police, and the NSA have been notified.
"
Good post, Will. Having taken the time last evening to read Google Guy's post that got him fired I find this more disturbing than I otherwise would be inclined to. Now I get that some of these types of complaints boil down to 'its unfair that I can't use racial slurs or make lewd remarks to my female colleagues' but what James Damore wrote wasn't anywhere close to that. The fact that its being treated and reported on as though it was shows just how far down the rabbit hole we've gone.a
The First Amendment is all well and good but at the end of the day corporate compliance departments and internet mobs are quite capable of doing damage to the norms of open debate. This is especially so as what is deemed offensive becomes broader and broader and ideologue bureaucrats in the government put their fingers on the scales with arbitrary guidance and audit/enforcement threats. Even though they lack the force of law its enough to create a sort of ruthless culture of CYA. I know all about it since part of my job as an in house lawyer is to help build it.
I won't miss the Daily Stormer anymore than I'll miss some of the racist trash thats been pulled from Amazon. However at some point we need to ask where all of this is going. I'm not sure its some place good.
On “Morning Ed: Society {2017.08.16.W}”
Apologies on the error in attribution (same to you @leeesq ). And yea, as hard as it is to imagine that there are people out there who aren't following every political development so they can eagerly go debate it I must concede that they do exist and vastly outnumber the likes of OTers.
"
Fun times ahead.
"
I think your analysis is fair and largely accurate. The caveat to me is that there's a strategic trade off that comes with abandoning civility and crying wolf all the time and thats what we are seeing. Freddie has written a lot about this.
Maybe what I'm about to say is Pollyanna-ish but I think a large plurality of white people, even those with some latent racism or conservative views do not support the political vision of sieg heiling neo-nazis. What you're going to have trouble with is getting them to make common cause against racist groups when the perception is that they'd be standing with the type of Calvinist (to use your phrasing) SJWs on college campuses and elsewhere we've been talking so much about lately.
I don't think your average person sees this as small-l liberalism of the kind our Republic was founded on versus fascism. They see it as crazy/stupid versus stupid/crazy.
"
You could even kind of include the Simpsons in its early days as being about a working class family just getting by.
"
The Arnold movie you're thinking of is The Running Man.
On “Charlottesville Milepost”
I think you're mostly right, but it's worth looking at why this might not seem totally clear cut, even to people analyzing it in good faith. I agree that you don't get to go goosestepping around with the flag of Nazi Germany then say your message isn't related to the things Nazi Germany stood for. They have to own that and any equivocation is pathetic and helps prove what cowards they are.
What confuses this is that it happened in a college town where the protest culture is now heavily intermingled with the intersectionaly cult. We don't really know what the counter protesters stood for. To the extent its opposing racism and the ideology of the Third Reich they should be applauded. To the extent its related to intersectionality one side really isn't much better than the other in this context. They both share the same assumptions about race, their preferred heirarchies are just different. In that regard I can't think of two groups more deserving of each other.
"
@mike-dwyer
I agree. I don't think the culture of fear that seems to saturate everything benefits us as citizens at all.
"
@maribou I do understand why people are upset by it and I don't at all want to appear as though I don't sympathize with those who are afraid. The images are very disturbing and its exacerbated by our mass media culture that profits on fear and panic. Its when things like this happen that I think its most important to try to stay grounded in reason.
"
I mentioned the 90s as well, my point was that these things have been going on for a long time. Doesn't make it good, does mean we need perspective. Like with Skokie, it sounds like there have been arrests in Charlottesville, including of the murder suspect. I'm also not sure I buy your numbers logic. We are still talking about very insignificant numbers of people.
I'd have to look into the argument that these are more violent than past events. I'm open to the possibility that they are but haven't seen any evidence making the case.
"
@saul-degraw
The people who voted for him do have agency and I think there's a lot of worthy ridicule to be dished out (I'll be laying some on my dad later this evening). The same can be said for the right wing media outlets that turned him into a politician.
What scares me is losing perspective in comforting myths about who we are really up against. The parallels arent exact but it reminds me of the conservatives who had their own comforting myths about Obama being in league with Saul Alinsky inspired terrorists or the New Black Panthers keeping people from voting. The country collectively went through it with Islamic terrorism after 9/11.
In a group of 300 million you can find plenty of people with out there and downright crazy beliefs. Maybe the Trump presidency has emboldebed some nutty people (no one seems to have hard evidence of that). What we shouldn't do is mistake them as the cause of our various policy failures and other social and political problems.
"
You're incorrect on the facts. There have been periodic white supremacist marches and other protests in this country for years, most of which are as small as they are dumb. You can google "1990's kkk rallies" and find lots of news articles. There's also of course Skokie back in 1977. You can see pictures here at this retrospective on the court case:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-neo-nazi-skokie-march-flashback-perspec-0312-20170310-story.html
The neo-nazis were a lot more clean cut back then but the numbers I don't think were much different.
"
Has anyone done an official estimate of how many protesters were actually there? Burt says "thousands" but I keep seeing hundreds which is more consistent with what it looks like in the pictures. Just an example:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/unite-rally-virginia-sparks-counterprotests-state-emergency/story?id=49176243
I'm not trying to nitpick but I think the details matter.
"
I worry that by treating the types of buffoons that 20 years ago got paraded on the Jerry Springer show for laughs as a threat far outside their numbers, popularity, or electoral significance justify we're creating a kind of al-Qaeda effect. Instead of rolling our eyes at the freak show and removing the statue as planned we've sent in CNN with breathless coverage and a megaphone. The worst outcome would be swelling their numbers by creating cause for fools and alienated people who want to lash out, and for whom the details of their professed ideology an afterthought.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.