The problem is that people are dependent on employment by a single party and finding a new employer is not automatic, which creates a huge non-diversified risk and creates abusive dynamics.
The solution is to make it easy, normal and automatic to either find new jobs, be a contractor for many parties, or be unemployed, living on UBI/rent/self-production and not dependent on finding work.
Monogamous relationships have the same problems and the same solutions (easy serial monogamy, non-monogamy, or being content being in a relationship with oneself).
I think you're more correct than this article. I read the first few sentences of the article and thought .. if employment was not at will,job interviews would be next to impossible.
The US is the outlier here, every single European country I'm aware of has the level of protection suggested by the article. And job interviews aren't an issue.
Or just find a decent person to be in a monogamous relationship that doesn’t abuse you by threatening to leave? If you feel the same way about your partner and your boss you need to find someone else.
The implicit possibility of "leaving" is always present because doing something together in a way that is desirable for everyone requires an agreement/meeting of minds/consciousnesses, and without it interaction is not possible, and without any interaction there is effectively no relationship.
Since people and organizations are always changing, there is no guarantee that there will be any such agreement and thus any relationship in the future (whether it is of an intimate or professional nature).
it IS easy to find jobs or be a contractor, that's what the gig economy is about, that's what McJobs are about.
But those are shameful. They are a product of the free market, capitalist system with NO worker protections. This is why people end up working three jobs and still live under the poverty line, this is why people with degrees end up working at Starbucks.
Workers do not feel valued because they have been reduced to statistics, and the pandemic has made it blatantly obvious; ten MILLION people have lost their jobs in a span of weeks. The country will go into economic and social decline, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank because the stock markets are doing just fine.
This is a real solution to a real (maybe exaggerated?) problem, but I'm curious to see how people in general would accept it, because the solution is associated with the Left, and the problem is associated with the Right. It's clever framing, and the benefits would reach far beyond the issue of cancel culture, but I doubt D's or R's as groups would seriously consider it. Hope I'm wrong.
I am a gamedev, and at least to us cancel culture became a really serious issue, it even caused a suicide of a famous indie dev after a Twitter mob made his business partners dump him and disavow him.
You call them a "Twitter mob", the game devs call them their customers and fans. If your customers and fans are telling you they'd rather not buy, use, and support your product if they know it's made in part by a known serial sexual assaulter of women, what would you do?
The guy sounded seriously mentally unwell. Maybe if we had better support for mental illness and less stigma around the whole issue, the outcome would have been different. But I find it hard to put blame for his suicide on the people who didn't want to be associated with him after his despicable behavior became known.
If you read more about it, the people accusing him and calling for the game cancellation are NOT the clients of the gamedev. Since I am in that field more or less I know why the distancing from him was necessary, and had nothing to do with the buyers.
The other thing is, the accusation (it was a single one in fact) was flimsy, the accusar have accused a lot of other people over the years and made some weird claims (like claiming she murdered a person in an alleyway)
I said twitter mob because it was a twitter mob, literally, outsied twitter he was not that bashed, it was only on twitter that there was a huge storm of people bashing him, mostly people that weren't going to buy his game in first place.
Maybe we are talking about different incidents then because the one that comes to mind is Alec Holowka, where there were multiple instances of abuse and his own sister believes he did what he's accused of. Those who fired him specifically state it was not because of a "single flimsy accusation", so I guess you're talking about something else?
But in a general sense I don't see why you assume that the "mob" are not customers or fans. How does "cancel culture" even work if the actual customers and fans maintain the same level of sales? What is the mechanism by which public pressure causes a "mob" to exert control over a company's decisions?
Ignore them? People are fickle, and forgetful. They only mob against a company or employer because it works. If everyone just ignored them, they'd stop doing it.
The guys who made Kingdom Come Deliverance were pretty outspoken and brash, and got a -lot- of heat. The game still did fairly well.
I believe you, and I didn't mean for my parenthetical question to minimize the suffering of those who do experience it. It seems like it's more prevalent in some circles than others, but I could be wrong. Either way, I don't want anyone lose their job when it isn't warranted.
Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems. You end up ignoring other forms of education and culture (for example, from the family or local community) in favor of those which are explicitly written down.
Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence. Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.
> Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence. Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.
Where do you draw the line between a disagreeable opinion v. something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job, e.g. the use of racial slurs in spoken language?
The concept of civility and politeness once existed, but unfortunately has been almost entirely thrown away. This is easy to see if you look up old debates on YouTube; it was normal and expected for people of diametrically-opposite worldviews to engage and debate with each other in a polite, mostly-calm manner. Compare that to the shouting-match of today’s media landscape and you’ll see what we’ve lost.
> The concept of civility and politeness once existed, but unfortunately has been almost entirely thrown away. This is easy to see if you look up old debates on YouTube; it was normal and expected for people of diametrically-opposite worldviews to engage and debate with each other in a polite, mostly-calm manner. Compare that to the shouting-match of today’s media landscape and you’ll see what we’ve lost.
Nobody's cancelling people over political disagreements; they're cancelling people for dehumanizing groups of people, regardless of the tone of voice.
People may have had orderly disagreements more often back in the 50s, sure (although the violence against Black as well as Native Americans in the 50s is casually and commonly forgotten - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...). The difference is that in the 50s, people weren't fired for casually employing the n- word against Black people. This is the difference between today v. the past. What you describe still feels like a regression.
I said cancel culture, not people who have lost their jobs. There are plenty of examples of people who otherwise would have lost their jobs had they not already been wealthy, so many that it is so obvious that a topic like this can be posted to HN without any prior explanation. Goya Foods is a recent example and the list goes on. They don’t seem to have done anything other than show support for Trump.
I despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, and think he has done significant damage to the office of the presidency and the country as a whole, but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.
Otherwise, I’m really not sure what your definition of ‘dehumanizing’ is. Outright racism and hatred is condemned by nearly everyone.
The boycott seems to be stemming from Trump's blatant use of bigotry against the Latinx community, so Goya is being blackballed by the Latinx community for endorsing racism.
Realistically, boycotts seems to be the only political tool you have in the US, with all major candidates could be considered varying degrees of authoritarian and sometime libertarian right[0], with no big unions like Germany. If you're not on the "right" side, this moight be your only way of speaking for yourself. Boycott is a non-violent way of saying "stop this", so if you can afford to, you should absolutely do it. Even for petty things.
> but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.
They used to call this “voting with your wallet” when I was a kid. I don’t really see what the problem is here. If I don’t like the ethics of a company, I’m free to buy beans from a company whose ethics I do like. This seems to be a critical component of capitalism. What are we supposed to do, force people to buy beans for Goya?
The difference is that in the 50s, black people weren't only cancelled by being fired, or cancelled via perjury, they were also cancelled via extrajudicial execution. (compare Emmett Till)
But looking at history with at least a layman’s perspective it seems this was only ever done in small subcultures/circles and never the norm.
Typically scholars of some kind and only within their group. So from a position of privilege: people who are well educated and have time to think. And given time to talk.
The mainstream media and social media typically don’t respect/support the latter.
Social media in particular is more inclusive. Everyone gets to speak as loudly as people ‚like‘, in a more protected manner.
Also there are vast differences in basic values, which were almost always hotly debated, even by the most well spoken, such as religion, equality etc.
> The concept of civility and politeness once existed
When? Where? How? What old debates on youtube? I've seen people throw out this line since the W Bush administration and as far as I can tell it just means most of them have never actually delved into the media they think they're exposed to.
US political officials used to fight each other, physically all the time -- senators bludgeoning each other into comas with canes, the VP of the US shooting and killing the head of the opposing political party in a dual. Andrew Jackson got shot something like 4 times. Dig up some of the terrible things Lincoln used to say about his political rivals -- The Great Emancapator used to spit fire at people. Before we had Rupert Murdoch we had Hearst, who literally caused a war, and is one of the inspirations for the term Yellow Journalism.
There may have been 5 minutes where youtube wasn't complete garbage but I recall Newgrounds being big then and seeing more than a few blatantly pro-nazi vids then.
Of course you can find specific obscure examples for or against the argument I'm making. I really don't find this sort of comment helpful or useful and it's rather tiresome when it inevitably appears. I'm speaking of general cultural trends, not isolated incidents. American culture is far less formal, polite, and respectful than it used to be even 30 years ago. This is reflected in language (vulgarity is far more acceptable today), clothing (far more casual), vocabulary level (far lower), and in countless other ways. Even the insults today are more base and direct than they used to be. If this is not obviously true to you, I'm not sure we can agree on anything.
For a specific example on YouTube, watch some old episodes of Firing Line. Here's one where William F. Buckley (conservative) talks to Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers (quite left-wing). For one, this sort of interaction would almost never happen in the modern media world, and if it did, it would be nowhere near as calm as the Firing Line episode is. Certainly Buckley is not a paragon of civility (see his arguments with Gore Vidal) but again, the overall culture was far more collected. Compare it to today, where every conversation is combative and the only non-hostile forum is something like Joe Rogan, who functions as more of a sounding board than an actual intellectual host.
Are you really suggesting that "racial slurs in spoken language" are "so abhorrent" that they "warrant cancelling someone's job"? That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc. This mob justice is abhorrent.
There are courts to deal with issues like racism. There are laws. Firing people because they say something you don't agree with is a very slippery slope indeed. Especially when it's not on company time. In my part of the world, it will likely result in the employer being taken to court.
> Are you really suggesting that "racial slurs in spoken language" are "so abhorrent" that they "warrant cancelling someone's job"?
Yes.
> That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc
It really doesn't. If you're "using" a racial slur, you're leveraging the definition of the word, which requires mal-intent by definition.
"Do not call me a ______" or "This word [written on the board] is a horrific hallmark of bigoted Americana that must be excluded from your vocabulary" is not the employment/use of a racial slur.
Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems. There are a lot of words which had their meaning changed or become less used with time to accommodate racial biases. Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
> Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems.
With racial slurs, always. 100% of the time.
It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense. You're describing terms which haven't evolved to that level of offense yet, words with which there's still a window of time to safely set the expectation that they shouldn't be used in a given manner.
> Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
True, though it's worth noting that we should be seeking the opinion of the impacted population about this rather than assuming it to be true (Ex: https://twitter.com/marcusjcarey/status/1271624977805185024 - a fairly qualified opinion around which language in tech, or infosec specifically, should be revisited).
> It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense.
Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words. Take Spanish or Portuguese, where the word “negro” (not to confuse w/ any English slur) really means “the color black” (etymologycally) and is thereby synonymous to black. It has always been used to show respect, in a less biased sense towards black people, because it really doesn’t carry any ideology in its semantics. But now, its use and meaning are changing towards similar slur words avoided in the US. It didn’t take a generation in such countries to change its meaning (politically), it is happening now, even though the word itself is the same, means the same, and had no problem at all a couple of years ago.
> Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words.
We're also discussing a chiefly American phenomenon, and while I recognize that English isn't the only language spoken in the United States, English is the primary language of business in the United States, and boycotts/terminations are squarely in the realm of business.
> It is mostly a global phenomenon, and the argument remains.
The article is clearly scoped to US issues. Language dynamics change when you move to other locales with other biases and prejudices. The article is even focused on US laws specifically.
Please read the article before you engage with others so that everyone's on the same page. I've disengaged from this conversation, sorry.
What a great assumption: one goes outside the scope of the article, therefore the same hasn't read the article, and then other perspectives cannot be brought in. It is only naïve to think this discussion isn't scoped in a broader perspective since the very phenomena is happening elsewhere as well, and the obvious impacts linguistics have in it.
The issue I see is how "racial slurs in spoken language" are defined. There are plenty of people who assert that criticism of Israel's behaviour towards Palestine, or Xi Jinping, count as abhorrent racial slurs for instance.
> “ something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job”
This is what laws around hate speech and discrimination are for. If some mob seeking social looting doesn’t like the laws and wants to cancel someone based on their mere preferences of what’s abhorrent, that’s just too bad. That’s not how protections of free speech work.
I think a lot of the unspoken debate on "cancel culture" is how much of a culture it actually is. If you spend all of your time on Twitter it can seem like the whole world is entangled in cancel culture, but in reality I think the majority of people have better things to do than call on strangers to be fired.
Employment law seems to me like a surface-level-reasonable way to prevent small mobs on twitter from spilling over into the real world.
>but in reality I think the majority of people have better things to do than call on strangers to be fired.
But if the majority of people are forced to behave super conservatively in order to hedge against cancel culture does it really matter how small that vocal minority really is?
I see the phenomenon to be similiar to people being worried about frivolous lawsuits or being worried about Karen calling the police because their kids are playing outside unsupervised. These events are rare but fear of them shapes all of society's behavior in a bad way.
Even more worryingly the behaviour deemed acceptable seems to be sliding window. So in a few years you can't even be sure any more what is acceptable to people calling for firings and what isn't.
Also all past transgressions will count at any later time. So something said today what might be fine is not fine in a few years. And someone might just dig up this thing and rally up lynch mob to act upon it. There has been already cases of this happening.
I do really see that some protections are needed. Either by preventing companies taking actions or making the people calling for losing job liable for damages.
Right, the problem is that a small mob of people can have outsized control by putting pressure on individual employees. To that employee, it doesn't matter how big the mob is.
But in terms of ending cancel culture, if a small mob is all it takes, how effective can anything but employment law be? People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves; the best the law can do is limit the consequences of that speech.
Free speech is not a positive in isolation, but need to be channeled constructively according to democratic principles. Most people are not educated to wield that power.
Yes indeed. Of the kind social media optimize on, most people are NOT educated enough for, or rather, society have not enough controls for; fringe outrage growing into trends and mob.
Let me clarify: While people may be educated enough to cast votes how many beans is in the jar, or what cause to support in the moment, they are mostly not equipped to be jury and judge of mob rule, or am I wrong?
Intimidation, harassment, and attempts to harm individuals are not protected speech. If they were, cross burning would be protected speech as well. See, for example Virgina v. Black; quoting from the Wikipedia article: "Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered the opinion stating, 'a state, consistent with the First Amendment, may ban cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate." In so doing, the Court considered the speech to be constitutionally unprotected 'true threats. Under that carve-out, "a State may choose to prohibit only those forms of intimidation that are most likely to inspire fear of bodily harm.'"
I always shake my head when seeing people smugly trotting out the "trying to get people fired is protected free speech too" argument. Don't they realize they're trying the same arguments that cross-burners tried in courts and failed at? Moreover, don't they realize what using having to use cross-burners' legal arguments to defend their desire to freely intimidate individuals looks like to an outsider from a moral perspective? If free speech proponents are forgetting things, well, they're not the only ones.
13/ Ironically, then, dismissing cancelling as a “culture” allows critics to not engage with the actual substance of calls for accountability. If it’s a culture, there cannot possibly be reasons behind their desire to hold people accountable.
14/ Side note: Look how often critics of #CancelCulture label their opponents as being a “mob” rather than a movement. A “mob” works off passions and emotion, whereas a movement is an organized effort to change society.
15/ And, by labeling calls for accountability as “culture,” critics draw the same kind of civilizational contrast as early anthropologists. They (often BIPOC) are governed by reflexive culture whereas we (often white) uphold the principles of free speech and rational debate.
Using labels to short circuit debate works both ways equally well.
13. The blanket term "accountability" implies some sort of clear, reasoned collection of guidelines. The reality is that there is little consensus on public standards. If there were a real level of consensus this wouldn't be a topic.
14. Calling your mob a movement doesn't change it's nature. Movement is every bit as loaded of a term as culture.
15. That looks a lot like "If you disagree it's because you're a Victorian racist". From what I've seen, the vocals sides of this are both affluent whites claiming to have the moral high road.
"We" are not "one society" thus "we" cannot do anything collectively.
Even in the scope of "the United States," it's never been one society and it is even less so now that it is excessively "diverse" racially, ethnically, and culturally. As the United States becomes more diverse, the less chance there is to do anything "collectively" "as a society."
To my eyes, it's an extreme example of hubris that Silicon Valley employees who control various aspects of the Internet have arrogated to themselves the privilege to speak for "society" or create moral standards for others, all based on the fact they have control of various social media platforms.
I have nothing to do with Silicon Valley and have never been there in my life.
The fact remains that there are certain basic values which underly the American experience. What those are specifically is up to debate, but clearly there are some foundational ones which nearly-all citizens would agree upon. This doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to me.
I disagree. We have decided a long time ago to handle such things with laws, not oppinions, not "common sense", not morals and not cultural beliefs.
Laws against discrimation exist exactly to protect against such things. And apparently discimination against political affiliation and political beliefes is growing.
> Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions
So we're going to ask the boss to pretty please not fire people because of what they wrote on Twitter? Without any teeth behind it? I've seen it happen in my country: here's a few millions€, please don't sell the factory, please maintain all those jobs. One week later the factory closes and everyone is fired.
No.
If we agree on a social norm, "please" must be followed by "or else". Without "or else", my employer's freedom to fire me will naturally override my freedom to write what I like on HN. If we agree it shouldn't, we need to build an incentive structure where it doesn't.
Laws and regulations are pretty damn effective, as incentive structures go.
> Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.
Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.
I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.
As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.
I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.
That is already covered under libel laws but it calls for it to be untrue and malicious. A negative opinion is protected along with statements of facts.
Otherwise you have such absurdities as being able to sue for a bad review for "loss of profits". That is why the law doesn't try to protect them. Expecting to be able to sue just for damages sounds like the sort of thing which gets your country's judgements libel ruled unenforcible under libel shopping laws after a history of abuse.
There are other parts of life besides employment. Universities have expelled or rejected students for publishing things they didn’t like (although this is rare and usually appropriate IMO.)
This doesn't seem to cover "cancel culture" more generally, but narrows in on regular workers being terminated for their political beliefs.
Is that what cancel culture is? I certainly don't think that's what most folks are referring to when they discuss "cancel culture." Is what's being mentioned here the common act of terminating employees who go on racist rants or act out violently and go viral? The piece preempts the objection of employers protecting employees from hateful conduct (without taking a stab at how exactly one should balance those interests,) which makes me think that these terminated employees are at least a portion of what the author is discussing.
I share the author's skepticism for the utility "Right To Work" laws provide workers, but I don't understand how this relates to "cancel culture."
Cancel culture is calling for firings or other loss of status due to expressing a political view or social view that does not conform to a large in-group with the ability to draw attention to an artifact (often taken out of context, with no due process) that undermines your reputation.
The other word for cancelling someone is bullying them.
Cancel culture is right-wing code for “facing the consequences of my actions.”
No longer is being fired for being a Nazi facing the consequences of one’s actions, it’s the result of a targeted harassment campaign aka “cancel culture.”
Bullying implies the aggressor has a power advantage over the victim.
You could just as easily say it is code for people on the left to impose their personal moral view as a Borg-like culture mandate where any dissent whatsoever will lead to having your life ruined through mob justice that considers no facts, context or due process.
Even if you may not have one belief and you have made an "ok" symbol to say "ok", if someone takes a photo, and they pretty much paint you as someone with a particular political belief, because you made a particular gesture that could perhaps be linked to a political belief, you may lose your job.
That's cancel culture.
It's simply easier to just do what the mob says otherwise you will get overwhelmed, in terms of handling PR, to begin with, when they can easily say "This company supports someone with a political belief, boycott them". You may not have the funds to defend yourself, and the time you spent investigating the issue could be also the amount of sales you may lose. So the easiest way out for you is to simply let this person go.
> The piece preempts the objection of employers protecting employees from hateful conduct (without taking a stab at how exactly one should balance those interests,) which makes me think that these terminated employees are at least a portion of what the author is discussing.
I assumed their thinking was that if the electrician was really doing the gesture they were fired for, the law would allow the firing. But the law would provide a recourse where the electrician could sue for their job back if it turned out the mob (and firing manager) were mistaken or didn't have sufficient proof.
I doubt such a law really would provide much cover for right wing people to bring them to the table, given the left has been redefining "hate" continually to cover more and more of the right half of the spectrum.
I’m in a country with very strong labor rights (Sweden), but we still have serious issues with cancel culture. You may not get fired, but you can be reassigned to a different position or have your career ruined. Also your employer can make your life pretty miserable if they want to get rid of you but can’t fire you. You can also run into problems when applying for a new job. It’s not a great solution IMHO.
Depends on what you mean by miserable and how sensitive you are I guess. An employer holds a lot of perfectly legal authority over you. It’s hard to say that anything that makes anyone miserable would be illegal.
Has this author never heard of tenure? All tenure has done is push massive conformity where groups lobby and lobby to make sure only politically correct people get teaching positions.
I believe greater job security would improve many aspects of society, this argument implies that people with very high job security designed to promote risky speech would promote more viewpoint diversity.
Yet tenured faculty seem to be part of cancel culture. Heterodox Academy https://heterodoxacademy.org, its members, and peers are trying to reverse the trend away from diverse views among academics, but they, or as a member I should say we, are a minority in academia and swimming against a strong current. That current undermines this article's argument.
Step 1 for talking about "cancel culture": define the terms of reference.
This seems to have a sensible approach given that it refers to people who are not public figures being subject to misinterpreted incidents caused by outrage spreading on social media, resulting in them being fired by their employer.
> While the government is not entitled to punish political dissent, in most parts of America it is perfectly legal for your boss to fire you if they happen to dislike the person you voted for in the last election.
Indeed. At-will employment with zero notice periods and no process is ridiculous. That's at-whim employment.
> But there are no equivalent federal protections to prevent employees from being disadvantaged because of their political views.
This .. is much more fraught. And they know why:
> Clearly, for example, no member of an ethnic minority should have to endure racist taunts at their place of work. But this could also be addressed through carefully worded legislation. Seattle already offers exemptions for political conduct that would cause “substantial and material disruption of the property rights of the provider of a place of public accommodation.” Employers also have an affirmative obligation to protect employees from racist harassment.
> Step 1 for talking about "cancel culture": define the terms of reference.
Part of the problem is that it is quite hard to do so, or rather it is very error prone.
Something similar happens with the right to repair movement, it both cases it is very easy to mischaracterize both the problem and proposed solutions.
For me cancel culture is how easily mobs are created online calling for action on inconsistent criteria. But it is quite easy to identify this phenomenon with the propensity of corporation to listen to these mobs.
IANAL (in any jurisdiction, let alone a common law one), but someone fired for upsetting twitter would seem to be a case of "termination at will", while someone fired for harassing their coworkers would seem to be a case of "termination for cause".
I find it funny the article just brushes aside the issue of whether vocal racists could be fired as if it's not the crux of the issue. (Yeah, there's some cases being labelled "cancel culture" that clearly weren't this, but those tend to not be the cases where the firing is defended by much of anyone. It's really frustrating how "cancel culture" repeatedly becomes a huge talking point when a vocal bigot gets fired, but everyone arguing against cancel culture goes through gymnastics to avoid talking about specific cases and makes arguments in the abstract, or makes arguments about the fringe cases that no one was really defending anyway, at least not for the same reasons that people defend outright influential bigots being fired. It's almost like if pro-life people constantly brought up regular murder cases in their crusade against abortion, and convinced themselves that the pro-choice crowd was supporting those murderers as part of their support of abortion. It's possible to abstract an issue to the point that the opposing sides are no longer in the same discussion any more.)
The bullying/mobbing aspect of Cancel Culture should explicitly be made illegal. I don't understand how people don't recognize it as what it is: idealogical "cleansing" in the same way the Nazis, Mao, Stalinists did it. Simple employer protection as suggested doesn't go far enough, the intent to harm one's career on ideological grounds must be punished.
Making it a criminal act would go against the 1st amendment, though people certainly open themselves up for civil suits for slander. Anyone who disagrees with BLM (Burn, Loot, Murder) is automatically labeled a racist.
Preferably we'll make it illegal to damage someone's career and conspiring to do so. Just like it's illegal to damage someone's property. You have a problem with someone's speech? Let authorities handle it. If the N-word is illegal, tell the police, not the employer. Where's the problem?
It's not illegal. That's the point. You're arguing that it should be illegal to ever complain about anyone. Writing "the waiter was rude" in a review shouldn't be a criminal offense.
Are you the same person that was suing people for bad yelp reviews? What's the difference between reviewing that your waiter was horrible and rude and your waiter was rude and called you slurs?
This article (and a bunch of comments here) seem to be arguing against a straw man: that there are a bunch of "minority opinions" that are being threatened to be withdrawn from the sphere of discussion by cancel culture, and people who happen to share these opinions are at threat of losing their jobs over it.
Cancelling is not simply about disagreeing with someone's opinions. It's about stopping the spread and normalisation of actual sexual violence [1], racial violence [2], or hate speech [3]
I think it's hard for American engineers (I am one) to understand this, but there are actually times in which suppressing certain vile speech and acts is good for society. Our profession deals with absolutes most of the time, but we forget that there are actually nuances and shades of grey all around us. In Germany, for example, there are very strict restrictions around Nazi language and symbolism [4], and for good reason.
Even in the US, there are towns in the south that have a long history of "cancelling" their local white supremacist chapters. Stores won't do business with certain people, they aren't welcomed as a part of the community [5]. This is to protect the town from damaging people and ideas, and is a perfectly healthy part of growing a community.
These vile acts and words are not worth promoting as part of public personalities with high-profile jobs. In many cases, those cancelled don't even face legal consequences for their actions, but are simply removed from the public sphere. With the way we idolise fame, it's a good way to help make sure that kids aren't looking up to rapists and racists as idols in our society.
And just to add another point about several cases which I know people will try to rebut my point with (Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, ...) These people were never unanimously cancelled like the others. There were debates even within leftist communities about how bad these acts were. And reality reflects that. Both Aziz and Louis have only had relatively minor hiatuses from the spotlight. Both are back on tour now (I went to see Aziz live last fall). This is not a "threat to our democracy" or a "threat to minority opinions".
Where the "hate speech" amounts to speculation that the availability of games like Call of Duty might well be deterring some former criminals from engaging in real-world criminal activity. It might be an uncomfortable opinion to some, maybe even a distasteful one, but people should be free to hold uncomfortable opinions.
> In Germany, for example, there are very strict restrictions around Nazi language and symbolism [4], and for good reason.
I feel that needs a bit of clarification. The reason nazi symbolism is restricted is because it is promoting an illegal political party. It is a disgusting ideology full of hate, but its symbolism isn't illegal because it is vile or hateful. The nazi party (NSDAP, and lot of other related smaller parties) has been ruled unconstitutional because it is explicitly against the German constitution. The same has been done with communist parties trying to overthrow the constitution, and you also have symbolism of the islamic state that is considered illegal.
My point is: the legal argument is based on the defense of the constitution, not on the fact that it is considered hate.
Germany also has regulation for hate speech, but that's not what is being used in the context of unconstitutional political parties.
That is not true. Section 86 StGB explicitly mentions "former National Socialist organisation" separately from other unconstitutional organizations. Since they were technically never banned in the FRG (as they didn't exist anymore), their symbols would be still legal otherwise.
Also the only parties that were ever banned were the SRP (replacement for the NSDAP) and the KPD (under pressure from the Adenauer government).
Independently of the effect on online mobs, I think ending at-will employment is a no-brainer, especially when healthcare is tied to your employer.
In any case, in many european countries we have something similar to Montana: at-will for a fixed period of time (typically 3-6 months), and after that you need a good reason to fire someone.
I was actually talking about this yesterday with my dad and we are Canadian so have “protections” and are not able to be fired without cause. However in reality what we discussed is that if they want to fire you they will do so. They will hyper focus on your performance and pick at anything. Small mistakes get written up and if they really want you gone will just lie about some things like claim always tired at work, slacking off, not on time whatever. This won’t happen at big public or government companies but definitely could happen at a smaller privately owned one.
An example of this was once my dad cut off the tip off his finger at work. The doctor stitched him up and said you will need 6 weeks off work for this to heal. My dad laughed and said doc I am going to be back to work in less then an hour I can’t get time off work I will be fired. The doctor said “they can’t do that” to which my dad laughed again and explained that’s not how the real world works if they don’t like you they will fire you and just lie. So yes there are protections but they just change the number of steps how you get a person fired.
Europe has this, and I'm a small employer. The question "what will it cost to let this person go if I need to?" goes through my head even before "is this person qualified?".
Stronger worker protections lead to a divide between people who have jobs and those for who there are not enough jobs. Go look at southern Europe or South Africa.
What workers need is the security of a viable alternative to their employer. Us techies can change jobs at will and have no need for this type of protection. The best general alternative I'm aware of is a publicly funded unemployment and retraining scheme such as A-kasse in Denmark. Even better would be UBI, but that would require more political will.
Society needs private entrepreneurs and corporations, and should work to support them. In turn, society should take what it needs (better put, society should only allow so much to be privatised) as to ensure stability and quality of life for citizens.
Business is hard. Don't make it harder in the name of transferring the responsibilities of society as a whole onto the companies.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThe solution is to make it easy, normal and automatic to either find new jobs, be a contractor for many parties, or be unemployed, living on UBI/rent/self-production and not dependent on finding work.
Monogamous relationships have the same problems and the same solutions (easy serial monogamy, non-monogamy, or being content being in a relationship with oneself).
Since people and organizations are always changing, there is no guarantee that there will be any such agreement and thus any relationship in the future (whether it is of an intimate or professional nature).
But those are shameful. They are a product of the free market, capitalist system with NO worker protections. This is why people end up working three jobs and still live under the poverty line, this is why people with degrees end up working at Starbucks.
Workers do not feel valued because they have been reduced to statistics, and the pandemic has made it blatantly obvious; ten MILLION people have lost their jobs in a span of weeks. The country will go into economic and social decline, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank because the stock markets are doing just fine.
The guy sounded seriously mentally unwell. Maybe if we had better support for mental illness and less stigma around the whole issue, the outcome would have been different. But I find it hard to put blame for his suicide on the people who didn't want to be associated with him after his despicable behavior became known.
The other thing is, the accusation (it was a single one in fact) was flimsy, the accusar have accused a lot of other people over the years and made some weird claims (like claiming she murdered a person in an alleyway)
I said twitter mob because it was a twitter mob, literally, outsied twitter he was not that bashed, it was only on twitter that there was a huge storm of people bashing him, mostly people that weren't going to buy his game in first place.
But in a general sense I don't see why you assume that the "mob" are not customers or fans. How does "cancel culture" even work if the actual customers and fans maintain the same level of sales? What is the mechanism by which public pressure causes a "mob" to exert control over a company's decisions?
The guys who made Kingdom Come Deliverance were pretty outspoken and brash, and got a -lot- of heat. The game still did fairly well.
Instead I think we need to collectively, as a society, be less sensitive to perceived insults and disagreeable opinions. Words are not violence. Disagreement is a natural, healthy consequence of a diverse society.
Where do you draw the line between a disagreeable opinion v. something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job, e.g. the use of racial slurs in spoken language?
Not rhetorical. Genuinely wondering.
Nobody's cancelling people over political disagreements; they're cancelling people for dehumanizing groups of people, regardless of the tone of voice.
People may have had orderly disagreements more often back in the 50s, sure (although the violence against Black as well as Native Americans in the 50s is casually and commonly forgotten - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...). The difference is that in the 50s, people weren't fired for casually employing the n- word against Black people. This is the difference between today v. the past. What you describe still feels like a regression.
That seems to be exactly what is happening.
Please cite? Need more than one, notably cases where people have lost their jobs for "offensive" language other than dehumanizing groups of people.
I despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, and think he has done significant damage to the office of the presidency and the country as a whole, but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.
Otherwise, I’m really not sure what your definition of ‘dehumanizing’ is. Outright racism and hatred is condemned by nearly everyone.
Context around what you're describing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/10/goya-boycot...
The boycott seems to be stemming from Trump's blatant use of bigotry against the Latinx community, so Goya is being blackballed by the Latinx community for endorsing racism.
Just because Trump is a politician doesn't mean boycotting people for endorsing him is only political. Considering Trump's generally-known and blatant bigotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump), it's no different than boycotting someone for endorsing David Duke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke)
[0] https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 (there is better tools but this one is Ok-ish)
They used to call this “voting with your wallet” when I was a kid. I don’t really see what the problem is here. If I don’t like the ethics of a company, I’m free to buy beans from a company whose ethics I do like. This seems to be a critical component of capitalism. What are we supposed to do, force people to buy beans for Goya?
Some others:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...
https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/#hom...
https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...
Plenty more instances that have happened in the past 5 years.
1000‰, without a shadow of a doubt.
But looking at history with at least a layman’s perspective it seems this was only ever done in small subcultures/circles and never the norm.
Typically scholars of some kind and only within their group. So from a position of privilege: people who are well educated and have time to think. And given time to talk.
The mainstream media and social media typically don’t respect/support the latter.
Social media in particular is more inclusive. Everyone gets to speak as loudly as people ‚like‘, in a more protected manner.
Also there are vast differences in basic values, which were almost always hotly debated, even by the most well spoken, such as religion, equality etc.
When? Where? How? What old debates on youtube? I've seen people throw out this line since the W Bush administration and as far as I can tell it just means most of them have never actually delved into the media they think they're exposed to.
US political officials used to fight each other, physically all the time -- senators bludgeoning each other into comas with canes, the VP of the US shooting and killing the head of the opposing political party in a dual. Andrew Jackson got shot something like 4 times. Dig up some of the terrible things Lincoln used to say about his political rivals -- The Great Emancapator used to spit fire at people. Before we had Rupert Murdoch we had Hearst, who literally caused a war, and is one of the inspirations for the term Yellow Journalism.
There may have been 5 minutes where youtube wasn't complete garbage but I recall Newgrounds being big then and seeing more than a few blatantly pro-nazi vids then.
For a specific example on YouTube, watch some old episodes of Firing Line. Here's one where William F. Buckley (conservative) talks to Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers (quite left-wing). For one, this sort of interaction would almost never happen in the modern media world, and if it did, it would be nowhere near as calm as the Firing Line episode is. Certainly Buckley is not a paragon of civility (see his arguments with Gore Vidal) but again, the overall culture was far more collected. Compare it to today, where every conversation is combative and the only non-hostile forum is something like Joe Rogan, who functions as more of a sounding board than an actual intellectual host.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPwk_Dbin8
There are courts to deal with issues like racism. There are laws. Firing people because they say something you don't agree with is a very slippery slope indeed. Especially when it's not on company time. In my part of the world, it will likely result in the employer being taken to court.
Yes.
> That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc
It really doesn't. If you're "using" a racial slur, you're leveraging the definition of the word, which requires mal-intent by definition.
"Do not call me a ______" or "This word [written on the board] is a horrific hallmark of bigoted Americana that must be excluded from your vocabulary" is not the employment/use of a racial slur.
Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems. There are a lot of words which had their meaning changed or become less used with time to accommodate racial biases. Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
With racial slurs, always. 100% of the time.
It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense. You're describing terms which haven't evolved to that level of offense yet, words with which there's still a window of time to safely set the expectation that they shouldn't be used in a given manner.
> Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
True, though it's worth noting that we should be seeking the opinion of the impacted population about this rather than assuming it to be true (Ex: https://twitter.com/marcusjcarey/status/1271624977805185024 - a fairly qualified opinion around which language in tech, or infosec specifically, should be revisited).
Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words. Take Spanish or Portuguese, where the word “negro” (not to confuse w/ any English slur) really means “the color black” (etymologycally) and is thereby synonymous to black. It has always been used to show respect, in a less biased sense towards black people, because it really doesn’t carry any ideology in its semantics. But now, its use and meaning are changing towards similar slur words avoided in the US. It didn’t take a generation in such countries to change its meaning (politically), it is happening now, even though the word itself is the same, means the same, and had no problem at all a couple of years ago.
We're also discussing a chiefly American phenomenon, and while I recognize that English isn't the only language spoken in the United States, English is the primary language of business in the United States, and boycotts/terminations are squarely in the realm of business.
So, not biased; appropriately scoped.
The article is clearly scoped to US issues. Language dynamics change when you move to other locales with other biases and prejudices. The article is even focused on US laws specifically.
Please read the article before you engage with others so that everyone's on the same page. I've disengaged from this conversation, sorry.
This is what laws around hate speech and discrimination are for. If some mob seeking social looting doesn’t like the laws and wants to cancel someone based on their mere preferences of what’s abhorrent, that’s just too bad. That’s not how protections of free speech work.
Employment law seems to me like a surface-level-reasonable way to prevent small mobs on twitter from spilling over into the real world.
But if the majority of people are forced to behave super conservatively in order to hedge against cancel culture does it really matter how small that vocal minority really is?
I see the phenomenon to be similiar to people being worried about frivolous lawsuits or being worried about Karen calling the police because their kids are playing outside unsupervised. These events are rare but fear of them shapes all of society's behavior in a bad way.
Also all past transgressions will count at any later time. So something said today what might be fine is not fine in a few years. And someone might just dig up this thing and rally up lynch mob to act upon it. There has been already cases of this happening.
I do really see that some protections are needed. Either by preventing companies taking actions or making the people calling for losing job liable for damages.
But in terms of ending cancel culture, if a small mob is all it takes, how effective can anything but employment law be? People calling on someone to be fired, after all, have free speech rights themselves; the best the law can do is limit the consequences of that speech.
Somehow the "everything is free speech and nobody should ever be censored" arguers forget this.
Beware empty belief in general principles.
That was a rather fringe outrageous thing to say.
Let me clarify: While people may be educated enough to cast votes how many beans is in the jar, or what cause to support in the moment, they are mostly not equipped to be jury and judge of mob rule, or am I wrong?
I always shake my head when seeing people smugly trotting out the "trying to get people fired is protected free speech too" argument. Don't they realize they're trying the same arguments that cross-burners tried in courts and failed at? Moreover, don't they realize what using having to use cross-burners' legal arguments to defend their desire to freely intimidate individuals looks like to an outsider from a moral perspective? If free speech proponents are forgetting things, well, they're not the only ones.
13/ Ironically, then, dismissing cancelling as a “culture” allows critics to not engage with the actual substance of calls for accountability. If it’s a culture, there cannot possibly be reasons behind their desire to hold people accountable.
14/ Side note: Look how often critics of #CancelCulture label their opponents as being a “mob” rather than a movement. A “mob” works off passions and emotion, whereas a movement is an organized effort to change society.
15/ And, by labeling calls for accountability as “culture,” critics draw the same kind of civilizational contrast as early anthropologists. They (often BIPOC) are governed by reflexive culture whereas we (often white) uphold the principles of free speech and rational debate.
13. The blanket term "accountability" implies some sort of clear, reasoned collection of guidelines. The reality is that there is little consensus on public standards. If there were a real level of consensus this wouldn't be a topic.
14. Calling your mob a movement doesn't change it's nature. Movement is every bit as loaded of a term as culture.
15. That looks a lot like "If you disagree it's because you're a Victorian racist". From what I've seen, the vocals sides of this are both affluent whites claiming to have the moral high road.
"We" are not "one society" thus "we" cannot do anything collectively.
Even in the scope of "the United States," it's never been one society and it is even less so now that it is excessively "diverse" racially, ethnically, and culturally. As the United States becomes more diverse, the less chance there is to do anything "collectively" "as a society."
To my eyes, it's an extreme example of hubris that Silicon Valley employees who control various aspects of the Internet have arrogated to themselves the privilege to speak for "society" or create moral standards for others, all based on the fact they have control of various social media platforms.
The fact remains that there are certain basic values which underly the American experience. What those are specifically is up to debate, but clearly there are some foundational ones which nearly-all citizens would agree upon. This doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to me.
Laws against discrimation exist exactly to protect against such things. And apparently discimination against political affiliation and political beliefes is growing.
Laws aren't the end in itself. Laws exist to help avoid social problems, and help keep society working.
This Cancel Culture is a major social problem. Society's tool to avoid social problems is to punish antisocial behavior through law.
Laws mean justice. Cancel Culture is politically-motivated mob rule.
So we're going to ask the boss to pretty please not fire people because of what they wrote on Twitter? Without any teeth behind it? I've seen it happen in my country: here's a few millions€, please don't sell the factory, please maintain all those jobs. One week later the factory closes and everyone is fired.
No.
If we agree on a social norm, "please" must be followed by "or else". Without "or else", my employer's freedom to fire me will naturally override my freedom to write what I like on HN. If we agree it shouldn't, we need to build an incentive structure where it doesn't.
Laws and regulations are pretty damn effective, as incentive structures go.
Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.
I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.
As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.
I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.
Otherwise you have such absurdities as being able to sue for a bad review for "loss of profits". That is why the law doesn't try to protect them. Expecting to be able to sue just for damages sounds like the sort of thing which gets your country's judgements libel ruled unenforcible under libel shopping laws after a history of abuse.
Is that what cancel culture is? I certainly don't think that's what most folks are referring to when they discuss "cancel culture." Is what's being mentioned here the common act of terminating employees who go on racist rants or act out violently and go viral? The piece preempts the objection of employers protecting employees from hateful conduct (without taking a stab at how exactly one should balance those interests,) which makes me think that these terminated employees are at least a portion of what the author is discussing.
I share the author's skepticism for the utility "Right To Work" laws provide workers, but I don't understand how this relates to "cancel culture."
The other word for cancelling someone is bullying them.
No longer is being fired for being a Nazi facing the consequences of one’s actions, it’s the result of a targeted harassment campaign aka “cancel culture.”
Bullying implies the aggressor has a power advantage over the victim.
Even if you may not have one belief and you have made an "ok" symbol to say "ok", if someone takes a photo, and they pretty much paint you as someone with a particular political belief, because you made a particular gesture that could perhaps be linked to a political belief, you may lose your job.
That's cancel culture.
It's simply easier to just do what the mob says otherwise you will get overwhelmed, in terms of handling PR, to begin with, when they can easily say "This company supports someone with a political belief, boycott them". You may not have the funds to defend yourself, and the time you spent investigating the issue could be also the amount of sales you may lose. So the easiest way out for you is to simply let this person go.
edit: added latest paragraph
I assumed their thinking was that if the electrician was really doing the gesture they were fired for, the law would allow the firing. But the law would provide a recourse where the electrician could sue for their job back if it turned out the mob (and firing manager) were mistaken or didn't have sufficient proof.
I doubt such a law really would provide much cover for right wing people to bring them to the table, given the left has been redefining "hate" continually to cover more and more of the right half of the spectrum.
Isn’t that illegal?
Yet tenured faculty seem to be part of cancel culture. Heterodox Academy https://heterodoxacademy.org, its members, and peers are trying to reverse the trend away from diverse views among academics, but they, or as a member I should say we, are a minority in academia and swimming against a strong current. That current undermines this article's argument.
This seems to have a sensible approach given that it refers to people who are not public figures being subject to misinterpreted incidents caused by outrage spreading on social media, resulting in them being fired by their employer.
> While the government is not entitled to punish political dissent, in most parts of America it is perfectly legal for your boss to fire you if they happen to dislike the person you voted for in the last election.
Indeed. At-will employment with zero notice periods and no process is ridiculous. That's at-whim employment.
> But there are no equivalent federal protections to prevent employees from being disadvantaged because of their political views.
This .. is much more fraught. And they know why:
> Clearly, for example, no member of an ethnic minority should have to endure racist taunts at their place of work. But this could also be addressed through carefully worded legislation. Seattle already offers exemptions for political conduct that would cause “substantial and material disruption of the property rights of the provider of a place of public accommodation.” Employers also have an affirmative obligation to protect employees from racist harassment.
Part of the problem is that it is quite hard to do so, or rather it is very error prone.
Something similar happens with the right to repair movement, it both cases it is very easy to mischaracterize both the problem and proposed solutions.
For me cancel culture is how easily mobs are created online calling for action on inconsistent criteria. But it is quite easy to identify this phenomenon with the propensity of corporation to listen to these mobs.
Then you'll just have to suck it up instead of trying to seek mob justice by harassing employers.
> You're arguing that it should be illegal to ever complain about anyone.
You can complain but not with the intent to damage property or careers. You can also criticize people but not assault them.
Cancelling is not simply about disagreeing with someone's opinions. It's about stopping the spread and normalisation of actual sexual violence [1], racial violence [2], or hate speech [3]
I think it's hard for American engineers (I am one) to understand this, but there are actually times in which suppressing certain vile speech and acts is good for society. Our profession deals with absolutes most of the time, but we forget that there are actually nuances and shades of grey all around us. In Germany, for example, there are very strict restrictions around Nazi language and symbolism [4], and for good reason.
Even in the US, there are towns in the south that have a long history of "cancelling" their local white supremacist chapters. Stores won't do business with certain people, they aren't welcomed as a part of the community [5]. This is to protect the town from damaging people and ideas, and is a perfectly healthy part of growing a community.
These vile acts and words are not worth promoting as part of public personalities with high-profile jobs. In many cases, those cancelled don't even face legal consequences for their actions, but are simply removed from the public sphere. With the way we idolise fame, it's a good way to help make sure that kids aren't looking up to rapists and racists as idols in our society.
And just to add another point about several cases which I know people will try to rebut my point with (Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, ...) These people were never unanimously cancelled like the others. There were debates even within leftist communities about how bad these acts were. And reality reflects that. Both Aziz and Louis have only had relatively minor hiatuses from the spotlight. Both are back on tour now (I went to see Aziz live last fall). This is not a "threat to our democracy" or a "threat to minority opinions".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/11/tuck...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-unifi...
[5] https://abcnews.go.com/US/life-inside-small-north-dakota-tow...
Where the "hate speech" amounts to speculation that the availability of games like Call of Duty might well be deterring some former criminals from engaging in real-world criminal activity. It might be an uncomfortable opinion to some, maybe even a distasteful one, but people should be free to hold uncomfortable opinions.
The case in the article was an electrician who lost his job, not a celebrity.
I feel that needs a bit of clarification. The reason nazi symbolism is restricted is because it is promoting an illegal political party. It is a disgusting ideology full of hate, but its symbolism isn't illegal because it is vile or hateful. The nazi party (NSDAP, and lot of other related smaller parties) has been ruled unconstitutional because it is explicitly against the German constitution. The same has been done with communist parties trying to overthrow the constitution, and you also have symbolism of the islamic state that is considered illegal.
My point is: the legal argument is based on the defense of the constitution, not on the fact that it is considered hate.
Germany also has regulation for hate speech, but that's not what is being used in the context of unconstitutional political parties.
Also the only parties that were ever banned were the SRP (replacement for the NSDAP) and the KPD (under pressure from the Adenauer government).
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
In any case, in many european countries we have something similar to Montana: at-will for a fixed period of time (typically 3-6 months), and after that you need a good reason to fire someone.
Stronger worker protections lead to a divide between people who have jobs and those for who there are not enough jobs. Go look at southern Europe or South Africa.
What workers need is the security of a viable alternative to their employer. Us techies can change jobs at will and have no need for this type of protection. The best general alternative I'm aware of is a publicly funded unemployment and retraining scheme such as A-kasse in Denmark. Even better would be UBI, but that would require more political will.
Society needs private entrepreneurs and corporations, and should work to support them. In turn, society should take what it needs (better put, society should only allow so much to be privatised) as to ensure stability and quality of life for citizens.
Business is hard. Don't make it harder in the name of transferring the responsibilities of society as a whole onto the companies.