> We envision a world beyond cancel culture, where employees are free to work... without fear that they will find themselves on the wrong side of their employer’s politics.
> That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.
I imagine it's a sample size thing, but if this board is any indication of the market expect to make less than $20 a hour if you hold non majority opinions and want to publicly voice them. If represenative, it may be that the blue collar world is a lot more tolerant of dissenting opinions in a strange reversal of fortune from a few decades ago where it seemed the other way around.
Although I was originally thinking those aren't great examples because of their fringe nature (vs the more common mundane stuff that people can get cancelled over), that might make them good examples. Neither (by themselves) are illegal opinions (yet), so as long as they keep it out of the workplace it should not be part of the employment decision.
So if an employee has an active Twitter account where they regularly post overtly racist content, these are companies that will promise to keep them employed, regardless of, for example, complaints from other employees who are people of color?
Sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. Also, who wants to work for a company that is essentially reaching out to hire more racists?
People like you are why that site exists.
The endlessly increasing list called “racist” is getting tiresome for those who want to simply speak their truth.
Personal attacks are not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: we've warned you many times about breaking the site guidelines and your recent comments have mostly (exclusively?) been flamebait and/or unsubstantive. If you continue like that we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this.
Hopefully he senses my comments are not not malicious.
My comments are not intended to start flame wars or attack people personally.
I am passionate and assertive, while also clearly lacking some insight into properly conveying my ideas in a way appropriate for this venue. I do care about not offending people, and having comments move the conversation forward. I often fall short of that goal.
In short: big heart, stupid mouth, work in progress.
I give lots of people lots of chances (you too, it turns out!). You're right that that's not always the case, but it is not nearly as arbitrary as it might appear. The trouble is that there are so many factors that it would be hard to write about in general. If you have specific questions I can try to answer them.
(But please let's try to avoid the lobbying-to-get-specific-person-banned direction - I don't mean to project that onto you, it's just come up in other contexts lately and there's always something distasteful about it, especially when it's clearly for ideological battle reasons.)
I doubt it will get that far. What's likely going to happen, if anything, is that companies will use this as a regular job board and will terminate problem employees as they already do. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way for employees to report a company. Further still, many of their job listings are with staffing agencies, which would only make it harder for RedBalloon to accomplish their goal since it adds a middleman between them and the employer.
I looked through the jobs and they also pay pretty abysmally. $16/hr for a bookmaker on Oregon, $17/hr for CSAM in LA,$17 for a warehouse worker in Washington.
Most of these places have a minimum wage of $11-$15/hr, so they're paying pretty much nothing for hard labor tedious jobs.
Not sure why this is downvoted. A popular refrain throughout the BLM years was "you can't be racist against whites" (and to a lesser extent "Asians and Jews are white-adjacent" with the heavy implication that it's okay to discriminate against them") which certainly suggests that a lot of people misunderstand "racism" (or if you prefer, they've overloaded the word with a new meaning and one which is literally racist, per the standard meaning).
I believe filter bubbles have gotten so powerful that the English language is actually diverging as a result. The various meanings of 'racism' is one example, I call them neoracism and classical racism to distinguish.
> The various meanings of 'racism' is one example, I call them neoracism and classical racism to distinguish.
I believe you make an excellent point
What much of the mainstream population interprets as racist behavior (a significant example being WW2 caricatures) would be considered both classically racist, and neoracist.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations would also be considered by many to be classically racist, but not neoracist. As neoracism views everything through a lense distorted by privilege theory, hegemony, and critical race theory, this would instead be viewed as a counter to previous racism. "Sure, give the unprivileged a leg up at the expense of the privileged, that white man doesn't need it."
If we apply the same to sexism, there are then two definitions of sexism - a classical one, and a neosexist one. One affirms what we know biologically speaking are the differences, and tendencies. Neosexism on the other hand, is viewed through a gender theory lense, tempered with CRT and privilege theory, completely malleable, and in many cases, rejecting the science of biology. Level setting to disadvantage men would be a plus. However, in neosexism, the pecking order would start with men at the lowest, followed by genetic women, and then into modified/self-identified and others.
We could also carry this though in sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, etc. For example, classical discrimination against traditionalist religious groups such as Christians, Muslims, and Observant Jews are frowned upon. But, in a neo-sense, discrimination against them, for having privilege or being part of power structures, would be a benefit, even, dare I say, celebrated, particularly if they benefit from Western Civilization.
This goes a long way towards explaining what we can observe as outgrowth of Critical Theory / Privilege Theory.
One of the common refrains of the "new" definition, is to redefine "racism" as consisting entirely of systematic racism - or to treat only systematic racism as important - the caveat of this is non-systematic forms of racism essentially get a pass. This is often combined with a very fast-and-loose definition of what constitutes "systematic".
The result isn't so much "you can't be racist against whites", but rather "blacks/PoC and minorities can't be racist".
Heck this may be the better approach compared with tolerating only “one directional” racism or being vague about what is it isn’t racism. Let people hash it out, let them learn and change over time, but if they are good at their job let them do it.
It’s already illegal to discriminate but should we really demand that everyone like each other too?
Keep work out of politics not just politics out of work.
What matters is what happens at work. I don't care how bizarre my coworkers' beliefs are, as long as work and non-work are compartmentalized. If you segregate people based on belief, then you amplify division and intolerance.
Racist people don't magically become unbiased in the workplace. I would not inflict a racist manager on a direct report who would be the target of that racism. Even if the manager isn't overtly throwing around racist slurs, to it's vanishingly unlikely they'd set their biases aside when it comes to promotion time (for example).
Your characterization of racism as a "belief" is alarming.
Your characterization of racism as a "belief" is alarming.
What word would you use for something someone believes is true, even if it isn't? I'm having a really hard time imagining what's wrong with the word "belief" here, to talk about the state of someone's mental expectations of the world.
Racist people don't magically become unbiased in the workplace.
People can and do change, and most of them can compartmentalize in the mean time. "Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person, and it's too easy to scope creep once you've got the weapon of ostracism and censorship ready at hand. No matter how wrong they are, we can't just permanently deny people access to jobs and public life. That makes them martyrs.
>we can't just permanently deny people access to jobs and public life
Please can you stop using this line of reasoning to dismiss racist behavior, it's incredibly frustrating to read this in this context. The risk with hiring someone who's being discriminatory is that they'll act in a discriminatory way towards the other employees, which then puts those other employees at risk for being denied access to jobs and public life. The weapon of of ostracism and censorship is already being wielded once that discriminatory rhetoric has been put out, perhaps you're trying to have good intentions and be forgiving, but the way you're going about it guarantees you'll be a step too late and the damage will have been done already.
If someone views YOU as an unintelligent/incapabable person then they are at home because you look a certain way, do you really trust them to make unbiased decisions about your future at work?
If you do, fair enough. I certainly don't.
Also. '"Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person' I would love to know the secret to changing someone's mind on this. I think the whole world would to be honest. If it were that easy, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If someone views you as unfairly taking advantage of the system through some never defined but ever present skin color privilege, do you really trust them to make unbiased decisions about your future at work?
Sadly in USA circa 2021 many people have forgot elementary moral wisdom.
Matthew 7:1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
Matthew 7:2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:3 "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
John 8:7 He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
One thing that helps is just exposure to counterexamples of whatever bias a person has. If someone thinks that all of group A are lazy, show them hard-working members of group A.
That's a great suggestion but it doesn't cover all the bases. It won't cover areas of unconscious bias. Plus some people just don't want to be convinced no matter what you do. This can be evident when a biased culture is pushing them harder in the opposite direction than you're able to push back. When that happens there's not much you can do besides avoid them. This stuff is a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.
Again, maybe you're trying to be forgiving when you say "we can't just deny people access to jobs and public life" but we absolutely can do that when they become a detriment to everybody else involved in those jobs and public life. It's sad but it's true. For people who are particularly detrimental to the point where they commit hate crimes, we send them to prison.
Why should we make every speech policy around the extreme fringe of content? Overtly racist content does happen too often including against white people in the BLM era--which isn't to say that whites have it harder or any such thing--but why does that justify policies that restrict lots of socially critical speech (e.g., challenging the factual basis for a given movement or citing research on the efficacy of nonviolent protest or publishing an interview with a Black man whose views defy media stereotypes [0])?
Supporting free speech and being a racist are not the same thing. If implying they are ever becomes as taboo as overt racism is today, would you expect supporters of free speech to defend you?
I think their point is that the people who complain about their free speech being stifled for being fired after a twitter or tiktok spat are usually, far more often than not, the type that berated young women for their swimwear or were spewing racist stuff.
That's probably true, but I don't think it's relevant. An awful lot of us who don't find our own speech being stifled still don't want the free speech of others infringed either. I may not have anything dangerous to say today, but I should still defend my right to say something dangerous tomorrow.
The problem is more what about companies that also hire people like yourself?
How can those of us who are good human beings get out of this nightmare society where evil people keep talking about what people Twitter in their private time.
What guarantees do we have that companies only hires from RedBalloon, not to dismiss it, RedBalloon is a great start.
We are certainly rich enough to have two society's. You can have your lynch mobs (It's a genetic thing, it's not a new idea, certain people like these things more than others) the rest of us can live our own lives as we see fit. But how do we separate us.
Out of curiosity, would Coinbase be allowed to post jobs on this site? Their policy as I understand it is “no political discussions at work,” which seems like it’s not a free speech stance.
"No political discussions at work" seems like it solves the problem right there. If anyone decides to break that rule, they can be reported immediately and if two people consent to breaking that rule (consent between each other), then the company doesn't have to get involved until one or the other reports the conversation at which point it's a simple write-up.
That was always the policy in school growing up too. I really don't know why we ever strayed from that rule.
Is it a free speech job board if the companies are going to fire me based on what I post on my twitter account? They say no cancel culture right on the front page.
Well, that’s a different proposed solution than why RedBalloon seems to be advocating. If I’m reading them correctly, they’re saying that you should be able to say whatever you want at work.
I’m interested in whether or not my interpretation is correct.
Yeah I'm specifically talking about CoinBase's approach. You're right that RedBalloon would seem not to be in favor of the "No political discussion at work" policy.
1) Cancel culture has always existed, it's just been branded in the last decade as a political wedge.
2) People (especially political pundits and libertarian minded tech people) have been crying for more free market principles to exist. Don't like Facebook is sharing your pictures? Good, stop using the service then. Is that the free market at work or is it cancel culture?
3) Whether an organization deems employees actions political or not doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is what the audience deems political. If an employee gets "canceled" and you refuse to fire the person resulting in an impact to your financials, you better have a good reason to tell your board why you suffered economic loss.
I have first hand experience with cancel culture in the workplace. At a former company, we had an employee (one of ~60) who tweeted something critical about Trump during his presidency that was drug out into the spotlight (it got Fox News coverage) by Trump Jr. Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).
When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).
Has anything like this reached the media, or is the media at similar risk? I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.
> I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.
Why on earth would I go to the media about <Insert PE Fund with $10B AUM that I don't want to name> when doing so would definitely guarantee me not working in that industry again? Think about that for a second.
Not you personally, of course. But I would have thought that the risk of the rumors this kind of pressure being used as a weapon by competitors, if nothing else, would have come into play to minimize this type of undue influence.
One of the reasons people buy products/goods is because of social proof - if that social proof erodes (i.e. one of my biggest clients cancels their revenue to me and tells everyone about it) then I have no control over what those clients' competitors say about me.
> Cancel culture has always existed, it's just been branded in the last decade as a political wedge.
To be clear "canceling" in the sense of "cancel culture" was coined by the cancelers. It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.
As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true. Certainly campaigns of targeted harassment have always existed (which is to say "canceling" has always existed), but the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel. Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
The canonical exception which proves the rule was the Dixie Chicks' cancellation as a result of their criticism of the war, and even then to get that kind of a response, the Dixie Chicks had to say something which offended a supermajority of Americans, while "cancel culture" today is typically about offending a small minority (roughly 10%).
> When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political". Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan, and I think your anecdote proves that it's not. There are elements of the left and the right for whom "cancel culture" is an apt description. Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
> Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
Keep in mind social media has drastically amplified the attention we point on cancel culture. Both the "cancelling" itself but as well as people talking about it. Perhaps that has also increased the amount of events happening, but it doesn't mean it hasn't existed (see Boycotting above).
> Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political".
You have to be able to define what cancel culture is first. As my little story pointed out, there is nothing I can do as a business to recourse clients not buying my product as a result of an employee getting "canceled".
> Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan
Maybe, but trying to assign a political party to the use of its weaponry you're only further creating a divide and therefore creating partisan. In other words, if you conclude that the left/right they're using cancel culture they'll only dig their heals in more and project that the opposite side is weaponizing it.
> Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
Ultimately the fact that there isn't a commonly accepted definition regardless of political affiliation is what holds us back from either eliminating it or accepting it as simply free market principles.
One example that immediately comes to mind is McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism , that 'cancelled' many people's careers and normal lives at the mere accusation of being a communist.
I keep seeing this brought up on HN. Isn't it telling that you have to go back 70 years to find a good example? At that time, the Democratic Party was still in bed with the KKK. It's not relevant to today's politics.
One could easily pull up stories of people in the 70s, 80s, or even 90s who were fired or ostracized for supporting homosexuality and gay rights. Left-wing causes like supporting unions or even more radical leftist politics was a firing offense deep into the 80s. The only thing that has changed over a couple of generations is that now those who were once on the receiving end of cancel culture have the power to turn the tables and people who grew up with the implicit assumption that their beliefs and behaviors were beyond reproach are learning what it means to face consequences for their speech or actions.
"Being fired for something" isn't the same as being cancelled. "Cancellation" implies a concerted campaign to pressure employers into firing employees. Being fired on the grounds that you've offended your employer or said something that is broadly unpopular are both awful, but they're different than "you've said something that offended a tiny minority of the population but they're threatening to call up our clients and slander us (and otherwise make business difficult) unless we fire you".
They did not fire you just because they disagreed, they did so because others would harass and complain until you were fired. Sorry if the attempt at making some sort of 'both sides' point went off the rails, but cancel culture was created by the right and was their exclusive domain for almost 60 years in post-war America. There was a large list of things that you were not allowed to say, to do, or even to be just because right-wing pressure groups and 'concerned citizens' would ensure that you had no job and no voice if they found out.
The only thing that is different now is that the shoe is on the other foot. I guess when some people find they no longer have license to be an asshole the transition can feel a bit uncomfortable and needing to learn about these things called 'consequences' that everyone else has been forced to endure must seem a bit strange.
Mothers Against Dungeons & Dragons certainly tried to cancel role-playing games in the 1980s and they were just the largest group to try and do so. The Dixie Chicks were cancelled in the 2000s for a single instance of political speech.
>It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.
There isn't a conspiracy being suggested. The use of this term was heavily promoted last year by certain people and news outlets towards a certain demographic.
In other words, the meme took off and became viral: https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-cancel-culture-tuck...
Which lean? Most of the "anti-cancel-culture" people I follow (myself included) are left of center, and traditionally free speech values were a liberal issue. The insinuation that "free speech" is exclusively a right wing value is nothing more than a figment of authoritarian rhetoric.
Tens of millions of people in the United States live below the median wage, by definition. It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.
I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
> Tens of millions of people in the United States live below the median wage, by definition.
Right, but that's precisely the point--the same is true everywhere ("median" doesn't work differently when applied to Europe or Asia! (: ).
> It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.
You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.
> I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
I think you're being unduly defensive here. No one is saying you have to fix any other place before remarking about racism in your own country. I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
> You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.
A country can be both profoundly wealthy on paper and have a massive indigent population. Statistics like median income don't account for the extraordinary individual debt, poor average healthcare outcomes, or the absence of basic social safety nets that Americans accept without blinking. Compare us to our development cohort on median wage alone and we look normal, but the median American goes home each day with more debt and fewer guardrails against poverty than nearly every other median citizen in the developed world.
> I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
I'm not going to claim to know every developed country's constitution or founding documents, but I'm pretty sure most don't have a 3/5ths clause the way that ours does. The US is a deeply racist country, down to our founding principles. It might not look like the kind of racism that passes for normal in other countries, but it's a category error to conflate that difference in kind with a difference in severity or deep-rootedness.
Well, it is Montana, it includes medical and dental insurance at 100% employee and 75% for dependents. The total comp is probably more comparable to other $22-25/hr jobs with minimal benefits for someone with a family.
Contrary to the media depiction in your country, the United States is a bit bigger than New York and California, and many of those mysterious places in between are pretty affordable.
That wasn't the original claim, and anyway I'm skeptical. Certainly the US minimum wage is very high if we look at it naively (in most of the world $13.50/hr is a whole lot of money, especially considering the significantly improved worker protections). You'd need to account for purchasing power and cost of living, and I don't have the data handy.
But it hardly matters, we can campaign for a higher minimum wage without arguing that the US is a terrible place. And I'll go a bit further--not only is the wild hyperbole unnecessary, it's actively harmful to the campaign for a higher minimum wage because people associate the issue with liars.
The original claim was that the US needed a higher minimum wage.
> $13.50/hr
Where is this number from? The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, unchanged since 2009. The only states with numbers like you've quoted are the ones you're also telling people to look beyond.
> arguing that the US is a terrible place
Neither I, you, nor nacho2sweet are saying that so I'm not sure why you're bringing that into this.
Unless you go and get yourself indicted for a crime, what you do outside the workplace should be none of your employer's business. Even if your biggest hobby is shitposting on Twitter and getting other people butthurt because somebody was mean to them on the internet.
I struggle to agree with that. If someone publicly shit-talks their colleagues on social media, even outside of work hours, that will create a toxic environment.
Same as if they make comments comparing black people to apes, rant about how much you hate gays, or (yes!) share your thoughts about how you wish white people would disappear.
Right, and if we punish people for speaking their minds we just drive them underground where this kind of thinking festers and becomes even more extreme. People need to accept that the internet isn't safe and neither can nor should be made safe.
Glad to see this. If nothing else, it's worth it if you want to hedge against a certain kind of situation that we see articles about here every week.
At this point in the culture war, I'd probably rather work for a small Christian company than some of the BigTech corps, all other things being equal. And I'm an atheist. Never thought I'd say something like that, but here we are.
There are, nonexclusively, three major things required for a democracy to function in a heterogenous society:
- A secular, pluralistic public forum,
- A professional respect for the opposition, and
- The ability to disagree in one area without affecting other areas of a relationship.
Right now this comment section is failing on all three, and proving why, despite whatever one's personal views are, job boards like this are necessary to prevent the destruction of the respectful opposition that allows democracy to thrive.
Just remember, when clamoring for censorship and destroying someone's career because of their beliefs, that every weapon we create can be used against us.
Turnabout is fair play, as they say. Today it's ostensibly truth beating hoax when the left is suppressing anti-scientific fringe views about pandemics or climate change, but yesterday it was also ostensibly truth beating lies when the right was suppressing gay rights, and tomorrow the pendulum can swing somewhere completely unexpected once again.
So let's all be more tolerant of one another, because reasoned, respectful disagreement is the fundamental force that allows democracy to exist.
I don't even understand what they are doing here. Do they vet companies? Is there anything about this job board that actually promotes free speech, or is it just another job board with some branding?
Here are some of the things that make me read it as such; perhaps this will make it a little easier for you to deal with our stupid culture wars in the future:
* prominent use of red - the color used to signify Republicans in electoral maps since around 2000
* complaining about "cancel culture"
* a lot of companies listed on the front have descriptions that make reference to Christianity; while Americans who identify as "Christian" are actually pretty evenly split as to party affiliation(1), Democratic Christians are generally pretty quiet about their beliefs, while Republican Christians are often very loud about them and their desire to make everyone conform to them regardless of religion.
* talking about employees who "value freedom", Republicans love to talk about "freedom" and how it is being impinged by things like "people calling them assholes".
"Free speech" is dogwhistle for fash. Americans haven't yet understood something that Europeans have practically internalized: when it comes to speech, the privileged are inherently much louder than the marginalized; therefore, greater restriction of their speech is legitimate. The conceptualization of the First Amendment that orevails today ever since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 basically gives license to the right to foment hate.
And so here we are: a job board to help the far right dodge consequences for their hate speech.
This is actually really useful for screening out a potentially toxic workplace.
While the idea of being “pro-freespeech” I agree with, in practice the people I've encountered who frequently express sentiments like what's featured on their page are uncomfortable to be around or discuss most anything that's not specifically work related with.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread> That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.
One of these things is not like the other...
(Edit, I was taking things too seriously and completely missed the joke)
Authoritarian Consensus
Decision by the Standing Committee
Hivemind Policy
Sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. Also, who wants to work for a company that is essentially reaching out to hire more racists?
Edit: we've warned you many times about breaking the site guidelines and your recent comments have mostly (exclusively?) been flamebait and/or unsubstantive. If you continue like that we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this.
In short: big heart, stupid mouth, work in progress.
(But please let's try to avoid the lobbying-to-get-specific-person-banned direction - I don't mean to project that onto you, it's just come up in other contexts lately and there's always something distasteful about it, especially when it's clearly for ideological battle reasons.)
Most of these places have a minimum wage of $11-$15/hr, so they're paying pretty much nothing for hard labor tedious jobs.
Define racist content, and what is not racist content.
EDIT: I am serious, since Twitter mobs define it in a way that suits a political agenda, obviously, to "cancel" someone.
EDIT PS: Bring the downvotes.
I believe you make an excellent point
What much of the mainstream population interprets as racist behavior (a significant example being WW2 caricatures) would be considered both classically racist, and neoracist.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations would also be considered by many to be classically racist, but not neoracist. As neoracism views everything through a lense distorted by privilege theory, hegemony, and critical race theory, this would instead be viewed as a counter to previous racism. "Sure, give the unprivileged a leg up at the expense of the privileged, that white man doesn't need it."
If we apply the same to sexism, there are then two definitions of sexism - a classical one, and a neosexist one. One affirms what we know biologically speaking are the differences, and tendencies. Neosexism on the other hand, is viewed through a gender theory lense, tempered with CRT and privilege theory, completely malleable, and in many cases, rejecting the science of biology. Level setting to disadvantage men would be a plus. However, in neosexism, the pecking order would start with men at the lowest, followed by genetic women, and then into modified/self-identified and others.
We could also carry this though in sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, etc. For example, classical discrimination against traditionalist religious groups such as Christians, Muslims, and Observant Jews are frowned upon. But, in a neo-sense, discrimination against them, for having privilege or being part of power structures, would be a benefit, even, dare I say, celebrated, particularly if they benefit from Western Civilization.
This goes a long way towards explaining what we can observe as outgrowth of Critical Theory / Privilege Theory.
The result isn't so much "you can't be racist against whites", but rather "blacks/PoC and minorities can't be racist".
It’s already illegal to discriminate but should we really demand that everyone like each other too?
Keep work out of politics not just politics out of work.
Your characterization of racism as a "belief" is alarming.
What word would you use for something someone believes is true, even if it isn't? I'm having a really hard time imagining what's wrong with the word "belief" here, to talk about the state of someone's mental expectations of the world.
Racist people don't magically become unbiased in the workplace.
People can and do change, and most of them can compartmentalize in the mean time. "Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person, and it's too easy to scope creep once you've got the weapon of ostracism and censorship ready at hand. No matter how wrong they are, we can't just permanently deny people access to jobs and public life. That makes them martyrs.
Please can you stop using this line of reasoning to dismiss racist behavior, it's incredibly frustrating to read this in this context. The risk with hiring someone who's being discriminatory is that they'll act in a discriminatory way towards the other employees, which then puts those other employees at risk for being denied access to jobs and public life. The weapon of of ostracism and censorship is already being wielded once that discriminatory rhetoric has been put out, perhaps you're trying to have good intentions and be forgiving, but the way you're going about it guarantees you'll be a step too late and the damage will have been done already.
If you do, fair enough. I certainly don't.
Also. '"Racist" is not a fundamental, unchangeable attribute of a person' I would love to know the secret to changing someone's mind on this. I think the whole world would to be honest. If it were that easy, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Sadly in USA circa 2021 many people have forgot elementary moral wisdom.
Matthew 7:1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
Matthew 7:2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:3 "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
John 8:7 He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
Romans 12:17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil.
This guy seems to have a pretty good track record: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
One thing that helps is just exposure to counterexamples of whatever bias a person has. If someone thinks that all of group A are lazy, show them hard-working members of group A.
Again, maybe you're trying to be forgiving when you say "we can't just deny people access to jobs and public life" but we absolutely can do that when they become a detriment to everybody else involved in those jobs and public life. It's sad but it's true. For people who are particularly detrimental to the point where they commit hate crimes, we send them to prison.
Maybe not like each other, but acknowledging their coworkers right to exist should be required.
[0]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/06/case-for-liberal...
I get that it's hard to craft precise moderation rules, but drafting policy based on the rare exception seems strictly harmful.
Citation needed there. If someone makes sexist and racist comments, their coworkers often conspire to get them fired.
How can those of us who are good human beings get out of this nightmare society where evil people keep talking about what people Twitter in their private time.
What guarantees do we have that companies only hires from RedBalloon, not to dismiss it, RedBalloon is a great start.
We are certainly rich enough to have two society's. You can have your lynch mobs (It's a genetic thing, it's not a new idea, certain people like these things more than others) the rest of us can live our own lives as we see fit. But how do we separate us.
That was always the policy in school growing up too. I really don't know why we ever strayed from that rule.
Mmmm, freedom.
I’m interested in whether or not my interpretation is correct.
This seems to be pretty obviously courting people with a particular political lean, not simply people who don't want to talk about politics.
> This seems to be pretty obviously courting people with a particular political lean
2) People (especially political pundits and libertarian minded tech people) have been crying for more free market principles to exist. Don't like Facebook is sharing your pictures? Good, stop using the service then. Is that the free market at work or is it cancel culture?
3) Whether an organization deems employees actions political or not doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is what the audience deems political. If an employee gets "canceled" and you refuse to fire the person resulting in an impact to your financials, you better have a good reason to tell your board why you suffered economic loss.
I have first hand experience with cancel culture in the workplace. At a former company, we had an employee (one of ~60) who tweeted something critical about Trump during his presidency that was drug out into the spotlight (it got Fox News coverage) by Trump Jr. Our management team received scathing emails from clients and potential clients that said "fire this person or never work in this industry again" (mind you some of these came from billionaires and CxO's of Private Equity funds).
When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Has anything like this reached the media, or is the media at similar risk? I'm sure some employment lawyers or journalists out there would love to know more about this kind of backroom pressure, whether right or left.
Why on earth would I go to the media about <Insert PE Fund with $10B AUM that I don't want to name> when doing so would definitely guarantee me not working in that industry again? Think about that for a second.
To be clear "canceling" in the sense of "cancel culture" was coined by the cancelers. It's not a conspiracy "to drive a political wedge", but a description using the movement's own jargon.
As far as "it has always existed", I don't think that's true. Certainly campaigns of targeted harassment have always existed (which is to say "canceling" has always existed), but the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel. Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
The canonical exception which proves the rule was the Dixie Chicks' cancellation as a result of their criticism of the war, and even then to get that kind of a response, the Dixie Chicks had to say something which offended a supermajority of Americans, while "cancel culture" today is typically about offending a small minority (roughly 10%).
> When your revenue is on the line you don't have a choice in this matter. So, to the parent's point, pretending to take this stance isn't not be apolitical.
Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political". Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan, and I think your anecdote proves that it's not. There are elements of the left and the right for whom "cancel culture" is an apt description. Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott
> Like any kind of social ill, if you rewind far enough you can find a time when it was common, but at least in my lifetime it was never normal or valued.
Keep in mind social media has drastically amplified the attention we point on cancel culture. Both the "cancelling" itself but as well as people talking about it. Perhaps that has also increased the amount of events happening, but it doesn't mean it hasn't existed (see Boycotting above).
> Like everything, opposition to cancel culture is political for a sufficiently broad definition of "political".
You have to be able to define what cancel culture is first. As my little story pointed out, there is nothing I can do as a business to recourse clients not buying my product as a result of an employee getting "canceled".
> Maybe the more interesting question is whether it's partisan
Maybe, but trying to assign a political party to the use of its weaponry you're only further creating a divide and therefore creating partisan. In other words, if you conclude that the left/right they're using cancel culture they'll only dig their heals in more and project that the opposite side is weaponizing it.
> Similarly, there are folks on all sides who oppose cancel culture.
Ultimately the fact that there isn't a commonly accepted definition regardless of political affiliation is what holds us back from either eliminating it or accepting it as simply free market principles.
Maybe one of the more prominent victims was Oppenheimer, who created the atomic bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer .
The only thing that is different now is that the shoe is on the other foot. I guess when some people find they no longer have license to be an asshole the transition can feel a bit uncomfortable and needing to learn about these things called 'consequences' that everyone else has been forced to endure must seem a bit strange.
I replied to "the culture where this kind of behavior is normalized and valued is relatively novel", with the Dixie Chicks as the "canonical example".
Surely, providing an older example that predates the Dixie Chicks, can be used to argue that the phenomenon is, indeed, older, no?
There isn't a conspiracy being suggested. The use of this term was heavily promoted last year by certain people and news outlets towards a certain demographic. In other words, the meme took off and became viral: https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-cancel-culture-tuck...
Further polling data illustrates the effect of this, where views on the term are split among party lines: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/how-america...
I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
Right, but that's precisely the point--the same is true everywhere ("median" doesn't work differently when applied to Europe or Asia! (: ).
> It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.
You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.
> I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.
I think you're being unduly defensive here. No one is saying you have to fix any other place before remarking about racism in your own country. I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
A country can be both profoundly wealthy on paper and have a massive indigent population. Statistics like median income don't account for the extraordinary individual debt, poor average healthcare outcomes, or the absence of basic social safety nets that Americans accept without blinking. Compare us to our development cohort on median wage alone and we look normal, but the median American goes home each day with more debt and fewer guardrails against poverty than nearly every other median citizen in the developed world.
> I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.
I'm not going to claim to know every developed country's constitution or founding documents, but I'm pretty sure most don't have a 3/5ths clause the way that ours does. The US is a deeply racist country, down to our founding principles. It might not look like the kind of racism that passes for normal in other countries, but it's a category error to conflate that difference in kind with a difference in severity or deep-rootedness.
But it hardly matters, we can campaign for a higher minimum wage without arguing that the US is a terrible place. And I'll go a bit further--not only is the wild hyperbole unnecessary, it's actively harmful to the campaign for a higher minimum wage because people associate the issue with liars.
The original claim was that the US needed a higher minimum wage.
> $13.50/hr
Where is this number from? The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, unchanged since 2009. The only states with numbers like you've quoted are the ones you're also telling people to look beyond.
> arguing that the US is a terrible place
Neither I, you, nor nacho2sweet are saying that so I'm not sure why you're bringing that into this.
Though I suppose that's why "Anonymous Balloon" exists: https://redballoon.work/anonymous-balloon/
Same as if they make comments comparing black people to apes, rant about how much you hate gays, or (yes!) share your thoughts about how you wish white people would disappear.
At this point in the culture war, I'd probably rather work for a small Christian company than some of the BigTech corps, all other things being equal. And I'm an atheist. Never thought I'd say something like that, but here we are.
- A secular, pluralistic public forum,
- A professional respect for the opposition, and
- The ability to disagree in one area without affecting other areas of a relationship.
Right now this comment section is failing on all three, and proving why, despite whatever one's personal views are, job boards like this are necessary to prevent the destruction of the respectful opposition that allows democracy to thrive.
Just remember, when clamoring for censorship and destroying someone's career because of their beliefs, that every weapon we create can be used against us.
Turnabout is fair play, as they say. Today it's ostensibly truth beating hoax when the left is suppressing anti-scientific fringe views about pandemics or climate change, but yesterday it was also ostensibly truth beating lies when the right was suppressing gay rights, and tomorrow the pendulum can swing somewhere completely unexpected once again.
So let's all be more tolerant of one another, because reasoned, respectful disagreement is the fundamental force that allows democracy to exist.
It's becoming exhausting being a non-US netizen. It takes effort to constantly be vigilant and switch context and detect US political double speak.
I am really not sure I am doing this right and I am tired...
Here are some of the things that make me read it as such; perhaps this will make it a little easier for you to deal with our stupid culture wars in the future:
* prominent use of red - the color used to signify Republicans in electoral maps since around 2000
* complaining about "cancel culture"
* a lot of companies listed on the front have descriptions that make reference to Christianity; while Americans who identify as "Christian" are actually pretty evenly split as to party affiliation(1), Democratic Christians are generally pretty quiet about their beliefs, while Republican Christians are often very loud about them and their desire to make everyone conform to them regardless of religion.
* talking about employees who "value freedom", Republicans love to talk about "freedom" and how it is being impinged by things like "people calling them assholes".
1: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/christian...
And so here we are: a job board to help the far right dodge consequences for their hate speech.
While the idea of being “pro-freespeech” I agree with, in practice the people I've encountered who frequently express sentiments like what's featured on their page are uncomfortable to be around or discuss most anything that's not specifically work related with.
"Applicants must be conservative and must have a desire to support and defend US Constitutional rights."
Its a reasonable requirement for a campaign worker, but what is this doing on this "free-speech" board?