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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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He then goes on to say that "there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior." He seems to support that sort of cancellation, whichever side of the aisle it is coming from.

I think that people treating assholes differently from other people in their local community is likely older than the modern human. Of course, in larger societies, the more basic social norms are generally codified into laws. But there is still a zone of behaviors with negative externalities which nobody bothers to make actually illegal, not every minor annoyance is worth a criminal case, after all.

Like criminal law, social shunning is a double-edged sword in that it can be used both to enforce good norms (don't run around randomly insulting people) or bad norms (don't have gay sex, don't criticize the Fuehrer). However, where laws are at least factually clear (such as StGB 175, which used to prohibit gay sex in Germany), the norms enforced informally have less scrutiny. It is easier to argue against a bad law than against a bad norm which is enforced informally, and laws can be more easily changed.

All of this applies to pre-social-media villages. In a village, if someone says or does something which one percent of the villagers hate totally, while the rest are 'meh' about it, nothing much will happen. With some 22% of the US population on twitter (probably heavily selected towards 'activism'), 1% is still a rather huge mob.

For offline celebrities, it is a bit different. They are selling themselves as a brand, after all, so if anything they do they do is bad publicity, that may have repercussions on how they are treated by companies.

But the average person on the street should not lose their job over icky opinions they post online. Either what they say is actually illegal, in which case it should be a matter of civil and criminal law, or they should be allowed to keep their job.

For pseudonymous opinions, I only see two cases in which doxxing might be justified:

  • directly to law enforcement for things which are actually illegal to say (but not to the general public)
  • the doxxing of doxxers is fine with me, live by the sword, die by the sword.

But the average person on the street should not lose their job over icky opinions they post online. Either what they say is actually illegal, in which case it should be a matter of civil and criminal law, or they should be allowed to keep their job.

This misses the weaponized middle ground of "Being around people who think such stuff makes members of protected classes uncomfortable, therefore it creates a hostile workplace environment, therefore people who are known to think such stuff must by law be fired"

I think the crux for me is how colleagues in protected classes became aware of the distasteful opinions of their colleague.

If it was because he came to work wearing a swastika shirt, then firing him sounds like a great idea.

If he ran an offensive twitter account under his real name, but with no link to the company, I would argue that this should not be a firing offense for a lower level employee -- don't google stalk people if you can't handle what you might find.

Even more so if he ran a twitter account under a pseudonym and got doxxed.