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.
How is that racially charged?
The Chief got the phrase from the guy who used firehoses and dogs against children during the Birmingham, AL protests.
The fired employee Tweeted today:
>In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0]
He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause:
>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.
>Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil. [2]
This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. If such actions were directed at me, I would definitely consider it as contributing to a hostile work environment. It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer" [3].
[0] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680
[1] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271531477209976832
[2] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
>“Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dail wrote in the tweet.
Yeah good riddance, imagine FORCING someone to say _anything_. And you twitter clowns are the good guys? Hardly.
Then you can fuck right the fuck off.
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
What I'm seeing is a lot of internal discussions, a lot of people challenging execs, a lot of people changing their profile pictures, etc.
Politics are always going to be a dividing subject, and I find it quite remarkable that we are all able to debate about these topics, and are even encouraged to do so. Sure, not everyone agree with some of the decisions the company is taking, but you gotta respect the transparency and the willingness to explain and discuss these decisions.
I don't think many companies would allow people to do this, and they would also probably get rid of people sharing too much.
“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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=When_the_looting_...
I'm sympathetic to his motivations, but his behaviour was unprofessional and unwarranted.
No it’s not. And this reminds me of the Dictatorship of the small minority [0] from NN Taleb. There are small intolerant minorities who are extremely vocal on certain matters to the point their opinions resemble a dictatorship
[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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.
People keep saying slogans like "injustice anywhere..." or silence is complicit ... but they mean just on this US/Western issue?
It seems like brigading people.
People that actually change the world don't need to advertise it on Twitter. I have friends that volunteer in Watts and Compton every other weekend (and have done so for years) that don't need to share it on social media. I can't help but think that this current Twitter slacktivism really diminishes their genuine mission.
With that said, I get the sense there is a large part of a story that is not being told here. Where was the manager? Has this employee had a history of maintaining appropriate professional boundaries with respect to communication? If Facebook doesn't have the appropriate paper trail, they could easily be sued for retaliation.
That being said, WOW that's some crap reporting: the only source mentioned in the article is what the guy himself wrote on Twitter. From the bottom: "Facebook and Dail did not immediately respond to requests for comment."
Reuters chose to spin that into "Facebook fires employee who..." Come on, a Journalism 101 teacher would go nuts over a student who wrote that headline with no credible sources.
(Note: this doesn't mean I agree with the behaviour shown in this case - nobody says politics between colleagues must be done over Twitter.)
(edit: sad downvotes without actual logical counterpoint are sad.)
Is it such a well known phrase among Americans or something that most people just learned was a thing?
Assuming you're in the US, it's my understanding that political affiliation is generally not a protected category. So if it's at-will employment at a private employer, it's probably legal to fire you for your political beliefs / actions (or "no reason" when it's really about political affiliation). If someone is engaging in behavior that bothers you, tell them to stop. If they don't, report them to HR. Make sure everything is in writing. But, be aware that HR might not be on your side; but at that point you really need to reconsider whether you want to work at a place where you are harassed and not supported by the company for not discussing politics.
I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper that hasn't done this.
[edit: if you want to see some articles about misleading headlines, see https://daily.jstor.org/the-incredibly-true-story-of-fake-he... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/youll-cry-when-you... ]
Cancel culture is part of this livelihood targeting shift. Behave exactly the way we say, or you're "problematic" and we'll kill your life. And we'll cheer and dance like soulless monsters in the tweet threads while you suffer. It's going to get a lot more aggressive yet, until a line gets drawn by the companies that comply too easily with the cancel demands.
The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.
At best, you're never going to change somebody's mind in a political discussion (you can only change people who are not directly participating), and at worst, there's the risk of being raked over the coils by HR or even losing your job.
Relatedly (but not specific to this situation), if we had stronger employment guarantees people probably wouldn’t taddle to try to get people fired as much. Win-win-win all around.
Hmm, mob rule and "educating people why they are wrong" does one thing - it sends these people underground and it's why Trump might win again:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/03/secret-donal...
I'd rather have these ideas out in the open where people can defeat the arguments properly without ad-hominem, rather than shouting them down. And hell, maybe even learn something new.
Here's the actual tweet explaining it - https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12664341539328942...
>oh no Arthur thinks I'm rude, how will I recover
Some high level laws by state: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff...
Sure shame the monolith that is FB, I would even say shame Zuckerberg he controls the place. But don't shame a fellow engineer who you work with, he didn't have any say in what FB was doing.
Also long term ineffective, if you promote a culture of shaming private conversations, then nothing happens because no one talks.
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
- Barack Obama
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca...
Why should facebook act on Trump tweets?
But the problem is that society at large, especially on the internet, apparently just sucks across the board at anything resembling actual discussion. It seems impossible to both a) give an issue national attention and b) have a remotely civil or productive public conversation about it.
I don't know what to do about it except to say we all deserve each other.
ETA: apparently the user giving Arthur shit is just trolling
"No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."
Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work for does not qualify as a political activity? But expressing support for or opposition to a candidate, law, or public policy presumably would. A company would presumably not be able to fire you for attending or expressing support for a protest or political rally.
(human) politics requires just 2 people, not a whole societies’ worth; even zero people at the limit, since politics happens in and with other species too.
e.g. government employees initially raise concerns on policy privately, then resign and speak out when the discussions fail.
I hope we never go back to our lives like nothing happened and I feel a responsibility to make sure I never do.
you know you can just not tune in, right? it’s not coercive in any way, unlike said dictatorship or government regulation. amplification of voice is not a civil right.
I think most adults feel the same way about social media activism, but they probably don't think it's worth their time to call it out even if it annoys them. You would just be begging the social media mob to turn on you next.
Unfortunately, there is no going back here - it's partly the issues, but mostly a totally new culture of a) Twitter wars b) a new generation of people feeling that it's their 'duty' to (act out which I often believe lacks context) c) a press and pop culture climate considerably more clicky-baity and divided (just google cnn headlines from the 2000's, way more tame) d) corporate pressure to 'buy into' movements which is only going to really exacerbate the system.
I've said this before to strong disagreement but marketers jobs are to sell you aspiration - when that aspiration moves off the court and into the streets and politics, and you're gadget/shoes/apparel/cars are being sold with politics, it's not only deeply hypocritical, but it's going to come back and bite us.
I don't really see the underlying fundamentals moving in a positive direction.
People might argue that if 'the system were fairer' we wouldn't see this reaction, my response would be that there will always be something to argue about. The NYT was literally calling for 'Paw Patrol' to be cancelled due to indoctrination of children by 'coppaganda'. While this is an interesting idea, I feel there will always be threads to pull upon for people to be angry.
The only way? How about reconsidering your own position and offering people something they would like better?
Politics is intensely personal. It's not so much about conflicting ideas, but rather loudly delineating social groups and whose camp you're in.
Pushing beliefs to simplistic extremes and demanding declarations of beliefs is an efficient way to make clear where yourself and others stand socially. Truth has little to do with it.
Politics seems "stupid" because we're putting the cart before the horse.
Edit: this is very basic EQ and active listening, not sure why it's controversial to have good social skills.
Possibly personal opinion here, but given the current charged (understatement) political environment and twitter's propensity for "scarlet lettering" people via mob harassment, I don't think this was borderline. This seems like a deliberate attempt to get a large group of people to harass a co-worker because of differing opinions about how and when to communicate political opinions.
I'm not saying there were no mitigating circumstances nor condoning the person's behavior but they are clearly correct on that specific point.
"It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many." Martin Luther King, Jr.
Getting upset when someone wont be truthful on things with you on touchy subjects at work is like being upset when someone wont be truthful with you on touchy subjects when you're pointing a gun at them.
More importantly, it sounds like he was bullying colleagues to force them to comply with his personal desires on how to do activism by proxy.
Worse, he was trying to force colleagues to risk losing their job in the process just so that they could cater to his whims.
These days you don't have to go to social media to find trouble - the social media comes to you.
“Thank you for your opinion but I’m going another way” is no more of a failure than establishing any other decent and respectable boundaries between peoples.
Manners maketh the man (or woman, or however an individual chooses to self-identify).
I'm not sure we should mark this down as a political and cultural climate thing. I'm more convinced the guy was simply an asshole and it so happens that he felt strongly about politics.
Nations shouldn't be so big and migrating shouldn't be that hard. Just divide and divide until the group of people stop complaining.
Racists can live with racists. Progressives can live with progressives.
The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence.
And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have written about this, see MLK Jr. or Maya Angelou for more.
This is the core of being an ally. Use your privilege to make the hard ask from your peers that a less privileged person, who is decidedly not a peer, cannot.
FB, on the other hand, is also right in a different sense, to maintain internal expectations that singling out colleagues with your political opinion in public is ineffective at best and toxic harassment at worst. FB are signalling to the rest of their employees what behavior they will not tolerate.
In the end, this employee leveraged awareness several orders of magnitude more than had he not been fired (and will likely easily find a new job) and FB protected whatever they believe their culture to be (and whatever other HR lawsuits they believed themselves to be at risk for).
We must ask ourselves daily, "what am I supposed to be outraged about now?"
The City of Seattle "assure[s] equal opportunity to all persons, free from restrictions because of race, color, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, political ideology, age, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, honorably discharged veteran or military status or the presence of any sensory, mental or physical disability."
https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...
This is an expectation. I don’t actually believe Trump has anyone filtering his speech and I don’t think he’s educated enough to understand the phrase he said, but with that said, yes, we should expect our leaders to be informed on the nature of the words they say especially in the context of a crisis or emergency.
There are a lot of logistic issues, though, I doubt this will ever happen.
First, it's not an accident that this happened two months into the COVID lockdowns. Seattle PD seems to be doing much better than 10 years ago, and yet nothing happened back then and we see lots of protests now. People get more anxious being afraid of the illness and from sitting indoors with 1/8th of the usual social contact, and with unclear job prospects, so they are more likely to act on this anxiety. The summer will turnt to fall, the Woodstock will end, the COVID will recede, the anxiety will subside, and the need to earn money will come front and center again.
Second, the kids will grow up and move on. Some people will never grow up, but it's not the same numbers. The next group of kids will have another cause to fight, for the simple reason that they will not be caught dead practicing anything done by the "old people". In fact a key element of all protests is the desire by the young to distance from the old in order to find their own place under the sun. This dynamic is fueling the protests now, and this same dynamic will undo the protest movement.
I appreciate your point that marketing is more about movements today that it was earlier. Still the capitalism has turned Che Guevara into a T-Shirt franchise, so it can go either way I guess.
It could still be that you're right and I'm wrong, but I think it bears listing all considerations.
While partially agreeing, i would note that "Havel's greengrocer" was more about situation where boths sides consired that speech act just as expression of power relations and loyality, ignoring its meaning. In this case it is more a case of "true believer".
There very well might be a direct connection between the upcoming election and the protests.
IBM commercial from 1934 'Übersicht hollerith lochkarten' https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/im...
IBM CEO photo-op with the leader https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...
as for the branding, you can say no without conceding either side. the target of this twitterer seems to have done it successfully, keeping their job and not conceding either way.
note that i'm not taking sides here either. just making a point about having the fortitude to put social media in its proper place.
further, if you can't take a principled stand under pressure (another useful skill), it might be an indication that the stand isn't principled, or at the very least, you need to find the foundational principles on which to stand.
This isn't silence though, this is rejecting an order to partake in a protest.
Even if it is silence, staying silent is still a right.
Harrassing people for silence is akin to harassing people exercising their freedom of speech.
Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change?
I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands.
Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives?
People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.
As for Dail's victim, you don't know whether he has or hasn't helped in his own way. This Dail guy wanted to coerce a coworker to do something that RISKS HIM GETTING FIRED. He said no to Dail; this doesn't mean he hadn't or wasn't willing to help.
I don't like FB and I hate Zuck's stance, but no company would allow someone like Dail to continue bullying coworkers and creating a hostile work environment. I wouldn't be surprised if he already had a list of prior complaints. HR doesn't usually fire people based on a first-time offense.
If you are ever in charge of fundraiser or are looking for people to join a worthwhile cause that you support, try to understand that you'll gain more allies if you're not shitting on & shaming people to do what you want.
- The former employee may have genuinely thought that a public "conversation" could result in a positive outcome (perhaps believing "sunlight is the best disinfectant")
- The two may know each other previously - perhaps the former employee may have felt they had more of a mutual level of trust/familiarity than they actually had?
- The former employee may have been wanting to leave Facebook anyways and (cynically speaking) wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and resign in a high profile manner
- The former employee may be neurodivergent in some way and have difficulty navigating the subtle boundaries of spaces of privacy that exist along the spectrum of 1:1 to effectively "in public"
- The former employee, frustrated and angry and activated by the heat of the moment, willfully decided to sic the mob on the other person
Honestly, I don't know this person so it's hard to say. And I do know it is often the case the hindsight is 20/20. But, I wonder, in this former employee's entire time at Facebook, did their manager ever notice any of these kinds of aspects in that employee's interpersonal interactions or collaboration style? In my experience, hints of these things surface fairly quickly in the workplace, especially during the ramp-up phase or the first time some sort of an adverse situation is encountered, whether it be subpar code, a deadline that doesn't make sense and is hard to change, or a stakeholder that isn't exactly aligned with reality and isn't very easy to get there. If this former employee (consciously or unconsciously) takes such an adversarial approach to conflict resolution with a colleague, one wonders if this was the first time they have ever done that, or merely the first time they ever did this to such a degree.
But who knows. The past few weeks and months have been insane. Many people are seeing more psychological stress and social unrest now than they've seen in their entire lives. A lot of them are not prepared to handle these kinds of situations in a manner they won't regret. It's unfortunate that it has to turn out this way, but on the other hand, this kind of behavior really can't be condoned. It's emotional blackmail.
I really hope this former employee takes to heart a valuable lesson from this, but I have a feeling that the exact opposite will happen; to be fired so publicly, with the humiliation that comes with that, is the perfect accelerant to a radicalization that might already be in progress. I don't know where we go from here.
However - the kids will be replaced by other kids.
'Social Protest' - I believe is actually a form of normal rebellion.
As kids grow and they come into their own identities, at some point, they have to rebel against something. Kids who are abused rebel really early in life. Kids with their own identity rebel in HS. A lot of 'well-raised kids' don't rebel until University - and this rebellion takes a more intellectualized form.
'Youth in Revolt' is perennial, it's metastasizing now because of the possibility of outrage.
That said ... Baby Boomers were considerably more outspoken than their progeny so perhaps whatever comes after Gen Z will be more chill.
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.
This sounds like the “straw man” argument. Just because I made a specific point about a specific utterance does not mean that I was claiming that literally every single thing he said was intrinsically racist. In fact, I think many Americans would be fine with the idea that this was a massive stretch of what I just said.
But you knew that and decided to post anyway.
How exactly do your friends volunteer in this two places that just happen to show up in Dr Dre songs from the early 90’s?
This is needlessly reductive and unhelpful. One can work to end racism and police brutality without supporting groups like BLM and/or making public declarations about the issues.
So, no. Silence is not complicity.
Not talking politics in the workplace doesn't mean not taking a stand outside of the workplace it just means you're at work to get work done not talk politics and I as a potential coworker frankly don't want to hear your politics in the workplace and, I'd have no problem letting you know that fact if you act in real life like you post, hyperbolic and unwaranted.
In fact, taking a stand for what you believe in is one of the fundamental rights the US protects and I think you should participate in any protest, march or riot you want to. I just think you shouldn't do it at work, and if you do, for people not to be surprised that it get's you fired at a few places because people don't want you disrupting their business.
EDIT: It is indeed about that!
This was intriguing, thank you.
That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones" in a cavalier way, just to feel good about themselves without it actually risking them anything probably describes a lot of online "woke" flamewars but (to me) doesn't very well characterize what happened here.
What if people like the police having free reign to assault and even commit murder arbitrarily because of false associations with, say, safety?
He has been doing the same old Trump-y things, such as publicly praising violent crack-down of protests in places like Mineapolis as being "beautiful".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/11/beautiful-...
Free speech isn't the First Amendment. Free speech is a broad foundational principle of liberalism, and the First Amendment is just an encoding of this principle in the context of the U.S. government. But go back to Mill's "On Liberty" and you'll find that he was just as concerned about threats to free speech stemming from social disapprobation as those from the government.
Anyway, I prefer this modified version of the strip: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECqxDQGVAAAXUgK?format=jpg&name=...
Beyond that, I'd be nervous that a co-worker like this might advance to physical violence.
Hear, hear.
In fact, it's an age-old addage that politics and religion should never be discussion topics at work because of how easy these discussions can spiral down to hostile work environments due to assholes like this guy.
And this case is just yet another example reinforcing the addage.
This is the decay of modern political discourse.
So please respect (not you but people who make such statements) individuals who rightfully choose not to get involved.
There isn’t just the “right” way of thinking. Which is what exactly is happening right now. “Either you think and act as we do or you are an ass*ole.”
Pluralism of thought shouldn’t even be in question in the 21st century.
The fired employee didn't make a political statement about what they believe - They harassed someone else's private choice, and then pressured them to publicly cow to his political will through social media.
As if anyone who doesn't publicly virtue signal with the movement is also the enemy.
"Your either with us or against us" -- Famously said by Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, George W Bush, and Recep Erdoğan. What wonderful company he's keeping.
It was malicious and ugly. ...and its becoming more commonly accepted on social media.
Thinking, saying and acting how one does does not exempt them from being the consequences of doing so, specifically, being judged for it.
OTOH MLK did not have his followers pressure coworkers - they kept it in the public, not behind doors.
What threshold must you cross (in terms of platform size) for silence to equal complicity? Since it apparently doesn't apply to you, but it does apply to a GitHub repo.
Once you've made up your imaginary platform size threshold, which movements must people not be silent on, lest they find themselves complicit through silence? Is it ALL political movements? Those READMEs are gonna get pretty long if so. Is it only the "most important political issue at the moment" that needs to be voiced? Who decides what the most pressing issue is? Is there some sort of vote going on that I don't know about? When is it OK to start being silent again? If he puts up a BLM message in his repo and then takes it down the next day, is that OK? Or does he need to keep it in there forever (because presumably Black Lives always Matter, so he should keep it in there indefinitely, right?)
There are way, way too many things going on for silence to mean complicity.
Take any other humanitarian crisis, and ask yourself if anyone silent must be complicit. Think about it for a second. It's just not true. If someone in Germany were to not speak out against the Nazis rounding up Jews, but at the same time was hiding Jews in their basement, would that person be "complicit" in the Nazis crimes?
The more times you can bring people of different opinions and beliefs together, the more good can be done in the world.
The activists of today just divide people, and cause more net pain in the world than the moderates.
Deep down I think these kinds of divisive activists are actually just fighting their own personal deamons and need a way to vent their anger, because their real personal problems in life are unchangeable.
Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change?
For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash at the next election and it reduces the chances of anything actually being done. Is someone allowed to make a critique like that?
The bottom line is there actually needs to be a diversity of thought to solve problems, and if you silence anyone who isn't 100% behind your message your not going to make change.
Response: "Crazy"
Only way to survive in a tech company.
Huge difference between "I'm waving the BLM flag because I believe in it." vs "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!"
The other developer, for all we know, could be in total agreement with BLM!
On your last point: This is what I fear most as well, a permanent radicalization of this individual.
One important principle in management is that you must be extremely careful NEVER to humiliate someone in even the slightest way in front of audience (any meeting >3 people by my book). The mere suggestion that "something didn't go well" can trigger extremely hurt feelings, defensiveness, and antipathy depending on the size of the audience.
Well on the internet, everything occurs in front of potentially infinitely large audience. To admit that you are wrong is to endure humiliation before the whole world. To deal with this, people dig in their heals, and claim that "I was always right, and those who disagree with me are not only wrong and stupid, but evil to the highest degree."
It's heartbreaking watching watching the far left stab their nearest ideological neighbors and most important allies.
No, and I never said as much.
My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.
I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.
Absolutely, my phrasing here actually reductive to the point where it doesn't tell us whether he had moral standing to do so - (and that's by design; I actually don't know enough from this article, or others to know whether I agree with his behaviour or not, so I haven't weighed in on that). I'd agree that "standing up for their principles" describes segregationists too- i don't think it tells us who has the right side of an issue.
Whether Dail is right or wrong here is actually irrelevant to my critique above: my intended point was supposed to be:
that the comparison between this person (whose activism at their workplace cost them their job), versus Obama's critique (of people issuing issuing barely-thought-through rebukes online that they aren't invested in), is a pretty unhelpful comparison.
People asserting changes to what is or isn't acceptable in their workplace are absolutely risking blowback for it, and I maintain that's not remotely the same thing as the online brigading / mob justice / cancel-culture conducted by people who can often be trigger-happy as they stand to face no adverse consequences if their critiques are rejected.
I apologise if my phrasing above made this less than clear. It looks to have been interpreted as clearly siding with Dail's position on matters.
---
EDIT: Your choice of example is also interesting though: "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!" is a clever choice on a BLM-related issue; as regardless of what happens in Dails case, it actually quite well characterizes the President's position (and his support bases position) on kneeling in the NFL -and now other sports-, to the point where he has called for the firing of people who refuse to stand for the anthem (and/or) flag.
If I was running a company, I would prefer employees not to talk about politics because it will create needless arguments that have nothing to do with the job at hand. If I am an employee, if there is a disagreement about something, how do I know there is not going to be a long-standing hatred from a colleague about my position on a topic that will manifest itself in unpredictable ways.
There are too many activists which make every topic good vs evil and life vs death.
He publicly criticized a co-worker and when that co-worker tried to discuss it privately, he publicly criticized him again.
Hence, many people are very secretive of their beliefs if they don't conform, and they may even "play along" like Winston does during the "Two Minutes Hate" (1984). Unlike 1984, we don't have a state or federal "thought police" but we kind of have something similar - a "thought mob" that patrols coworkers for evidence of thought crime.
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.
I'd like to portray another question for you to consider: Do you think being able to have this policy is an inherently privileged position? For the record, I don't disagree with you. I have the same one.
I don't want to assume anything about you, so I'll speak about myself: I'm a het cis white male. I'm well-educated and well paid. Politics basically don't affect me unless it's taxes (which is why our industry ends up leaning so heavily libertarian." I am able to CHOOSE when to discuss political/social issues because i am able to CHOOSE when they affect me.
This is not the case for many others, including I bet your coworkers. If you are a woman, non-hetero, non-cis, or a racial minority, you don't get to choose whether politics/society affects your life - it is automatic. There is no clean separation for a lot of people between work and life and it spills over, and even if they intend to not bring it up, it sometimes will.
I say all this not to get you to change your policy, but to keep in mind why others may not be able to have the same one. What will naturally follow from that, is that people invariably look for allies. So if someone asks you to discuss a subject, one that violates your policy, you should really consider whether your policy actually makes sense in the world, or if it only helps you while actively harming those around you.
So if you're an ally, you should consider flexing your policy, and trying to help.
And if you're not, well...then your silence IS complicit, and you shouldn't be surprised if it affects your career accordingly.
When the "acceptable views" being discussed are stuff like Black people shouldn't get murdered by the police at a disproportionately higher rate accounting for all other factors than White People.
FFS, it's not like there is a public debate about whether we should guillotine Jeff Bezos.
If you're finding yourself having to pretend to agree with the 'acceptable views' of the world today, maybe your views are actually shitty and unacceptable?
