zlacker

>>Tanger+(OP)
I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence".

In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.

>>nsains+P8
I'm starting a new job soon and I'm trying to figure out how I'll handle these "silence is complicit" characters. My personal policy is to not discuss political/social issues at work.

>>PiggyS+Ha
Kill em with kindness.

“Thanks for letting me know how you feel about this, I consider this a valuable opinion and think deeply on it”.

Then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway, but at least let them know you’ve heard and acknowledged what they had to say. Sometimes folks just want to be acknowledged, that doesn’t seem like too much of a burden.

>>dvtrn+wb
I this this is a good approach that I've used before.

I think it starts to crumble when people start to demand you to do stuff like posting on your social media or showing them donation receipts.

>>PiggyS+gc
I think the unfortunate reality is that some people are intolerant of others who are insufficiently supportive of certain causes, and the only way to deal with those people is not to deal with them. The subject of this thread seems to be one of those people.

>>nickff+Kc
I think the unfortunate reality is that this isn't about individual people expecting support for certain causes. What you're looking at is fundamentally a social phenomenon - a belief that's been spreading from person to person and community to community that every person in the social group must support the correct causes in the correct ways, that anyone who doesn't go along with this is actively going against the cause and must be shamed and shunned until they do. It's the social spread via peer pressure that gives this its power. This isn't a new thing, it's been spreading amongst the tech community and elsewhere for probably well over a decade at this point.

>>makomk+Fe
I agree that this type of toxic peer-pressure is spreading, and I have no idea what to do about it. It reminds me of what Louis Fischer and Arthur Koestler described in their respective essays in "The God That Failed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed