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It was a fine argument. We have overwhelming evidence that it can't be maintained in an environment of values-diversity. The same author went on to write Be Nice At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness, and then a year later wrote Kolmogorov Complicity And the Parable of Lightning. Now, I'm given to understand, he declines to write about these matters at all. Taken in sequence, it seems to me that the trajectory isn't hard to plot.
You know who hasn't had to engage in a grinding rhetorical retreat year after year? Zunger. He got it right the first time. Ditto for Ozy.
I think the idea of political ideology being at least somewhat protected (in my view, muc( like religion) simply because it’s easy and therefore tempting to use the threat of unemployment as a cudgel to prevent public expressions of non-mainstream politics. The temptation to use this, and thus use social media “job-swatting” (gee wouldn’t it be terrible if this crime-thinker’s name and photo and screenshots went to the HR office of his company X) to either threaten or punish public expressions of political opinions. And depending on where you happen to live, even relatively sane and even centrist opinions might well offend someone who can get you fired and thus potentially unemployable depending on industry. This creates a situation where people learn to self censor and be very careful about what they say in public. It would be highly irresponsible if you live in a blue city and work in a blue coded industry to openly express support for Israel, or to openly express opposition to abortion. And so it’s creating “the closet” for politics and somewhat religion if the religion is too strongly coded for a political outlook. People have talked about it here before, they don’t tell anyone they work with that they’re conservative, often trying to figure out how they can quietly signal opposition to things like pronouns in their email taglines without attracting the attention of HR.
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