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
The “silence is complicit” stuff does really annoy me. Shaming people for not having the same political beliefs is already one thing. But shaming them for having those beliefs, but not sharing them in arenas they’re not comfortable sharing them in is quite extreme.

>>baron8+2g
This is interesting to consider in combination with the xkcd "showing you the door" free speech comic.

If staying silent is unacceptable and saying something "wrong" is unacceptable, then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.

That's quite twisted.

>>caseys+8A
> then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.

Wow, that sounds eerily like 1984:

"In the Two Minutes Hate [Winston] could not help sharing in the general delirium ... Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him."

Basically, if you have to do that, it means there is some implementation of thought police around you that you are hiding from.