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PoliGAF 2016 |OT11| Well this is exciting

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2014:
13310430_10209742989870229_6032313482140829475_n.jpg

2016:

Will work on more photogenic pictures with each

I hope I didn't trigger erasureacer
 

Gotchaye

Member
You just sort of hand wave how to cover my argument though. I mean, surely incompetence is grounds for firing, right? I don't see a world where damaged sales isn't being incompetent. You could argue that I'm not being honest when I claim that as my reason for termination, but you'd never be able to prove that.

Then I don't understand what the argument was. You suggest that companies aren't really firing people for their speech, but because that speech has consequences for the company it is economically rational for the company to fire them and that's fine. I show why that's a ridiculous way to think about everything else that we say companies shouldn't fire people for, so of course if you think that companies shouldn't be firing people for their speech then they should similarly not be allowed to fire people because customers don't like their speech. What else was there?

Like, if you don't think that companies should be able to fire people for being incompetent then obviously you shouldn't let companies fire incompetent employees by virtue of their being less productive. That's just playing word games. But I don't understand what the argument is against companies being able to fire incompetent employees.

Edit: Ohh, is the idea that someone who says something unpopular online is incompetent if it turns out that customers decide not to buy from the company because of that? I don't think that makes sense - you could obviously say exactly the same thing about someone who has an unpopular religion even if you're unwilling to follow your logic all the way through and conclude that black people were (and to some extent still are) inherently less competent just because customers don't like them as much. Like I said in my first post, I think you can reasonably count some people's public personas as part of their job performance, but to do this for everyone is actually really scary.

As for discrimination, I don't fundamentally put political opinions in the same category at all.
I don't know what this means. What is the "category"?
 
Congrats! Does his say Huma?
I jokingly told the guy who was doing it that I wanted my ring to say "Hillary" on the inside. And, he was kinda confused about the whole gay thing anyway, and he nicely said "Well, your fiance wrote down what I'm supposed to put...and it's not Hillary."
 

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
Our endorsement is rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage over a career of almost continuous public service, often as the first or only woman in the arena.
She is one of the most tenacious politicians of her generation, whose willingness to study and correct course is rare in an age of unyielding partisanship. As first lady, she rebounded from professional setbacks and personal trials with astounding resilience. Over eight years in the Senate and four as secretary of state, she built a reputation for grit and bipartisan collaboration. She displayed a command of policy and diplomatic nuance and an ability to listen to constituents and colleagues that are all too exceptional in Washington.
Mrs. Clinton’s service spans both eras, and she has learned hard lessons from the three presidents she has studied up close. She has also made her own share of mistakes. She has evinced a lamentable penchant for secrecy and made a poor decision to rely on a private email server while at the State Department. That decision deserved scrutiny, and it’s had it. Now, considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next president, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk.
Through war and recession, Americans born since 9/11 have had to grow up fast, and they deserve a grown-up president. A lifetime’s commitment to solving problems in the real world qualifies Hillary Clinton for this job, and the country should put her to work.

Beautiful. Werk, queen.
 
He there been cases of say a Hobby Lobby firing a pro choice employee?

Or a company seeing that somebody donated money to a political cause that's different than the CEOs?

I'm always uncomfortable with the idea of a company that affects so many facing scrutiny over what somebody does in their private life.

Yes I understand economic protests and image are responsible for things such as the fall of apartheid and I'd argue other social reforms but I don't really like the idea of a singular employee even one so high up as what's his face being the cause of econmic protests towards Occulus.

I mean I think people should be able to do what they want and if part of that is no buying from companies that they feel go against them values and beliefs more power to them but I'm always fearful about a future where say religious groups refuse to shop at a store because they employ a gay man or maybe an ultra orthodox religious group refuses to go to a pool unless they segregate genders.

Am I off here?

Eh...I think you are off a little bit. i work in government, but we have an EXTREMELY strict social media policy for everyone from the top all the way down the most entry level clerk that generally says "be smart and don't post anything" as well as a clause in the code of ethics that says that everything you do even while off the clock can reflect poorly on the agency and can be grounds for termination.

There's an understanding that a company's employees to some extent are reflective of the company itself and who it chooses to hire- NOT terminating someone going out of their way to spread toxic messages in public reflects on the agency/company itself and not in a good way. It's grounds for termination in that case- and we've won a lot of unemployment cases on those grounds.
 

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
When are people going to learn? Hillary does not give a fuck. She is not flappable. You could explode a nuclear bomb in her fucking face and she would wonder who farted.
 

East Lake

Member
I don't really understand where you're going with that. The big philosophical difference between liberals and libertarians is that liberals are concerned with maximizing liberty full stop whereas libertarians are concerned only with the ways that the government can reduce liberty (with a small number of exceptions for things like murder). A libertarian would agree but put this in terms of negative and positive liberty. "Freedom from speech is not freedom from consequences" is often used to defend inflicting incredibly severe punishments on people just because it's society and not the government doing the inflicting. That's basically as far as the analysis ever goes.

But sure, I agree that mostly the reason that some liberals endorse this idea is that they have this sense that it's working to their advantage right now. As I said, I'm not actually sure that this is true - I suspect they're fooled by the high-profile man bites dog "CEO fired for racist tweets" stuff into overlooking the much more common occasions where employers can inappropriately exercise their power over low-level employees. But regardless, that does not mean that it's consistent with their principles. Like, what is the liberal argument that there shouldn't just be government-imposed fines for speech that they would be happy to see render people unemployable? I haven't really ever seen one. I've seen what's clearly a libertarian argument for this, though, which depends on a magical distinction between government and private action.

This is often also just nakedly punitive in a way that I don't think is antithetical to liberalism but is at least inconsistent with other trends in modern liberal thought.
I guess to rephrase I'm saying the average person might not see this as libertarian thought, and if it is it might not be contradictory. To speak personally I haven't payed attention to many high profile boycotts or firings like this so when you say a law would be good I wonder how this actually maximizes liberty. Is this a widespread problem? There's also plenty of things people do voluntarily that probably minimize liberty but aren't illegal, so what makes this particularly important?
 
Why do people put a space before their punctuation like that? People told me on GAF it was a bilingual quirk because of French grammar rules. But this is clearly not entirely true.

Sometimes it's an auto-correct thing.

Exit:Gotchaye, I'm away from my computer, but I'm not ignoring you. I want to type too much for my phone lol.
 

kingkitty

Member
Remember, he'll delete (and reupload) tweets that are misspelled. But he still won't delete the tweet calling Cruz's wife ugly. Even after Cruz endorses him.

MAGA.
 

royalan

Member
It'll only be a shit show if Donald makes it one.

I doubt there's anyone Trump could put in the front row that would get a reaction out of Hillary.

Meanwhile, just the sight of Cuban in the front row is going to have Donald aching to throw a fit.
 

kevin1025

Banned
It'll only be a shit show if Donald makes it one.

I doubt there's anyone Trump could put in the front row that would get a reaction out of Hillary.

Meanwhile, just the sight of Cuban in the front row is going to have Donald aching to throw a fit.

If this is the sort of thing upsetting him before he even gets up there, then he's going in ready to call it all unfair and throw a tantrum. He's been bottling up his insanity for weeks now with teleprompters and keeping to friendly old Fox News.

For him maybe. Clinton just needs to be above it. Not her fault if he starts attacking Cuban

Yep, exactly.
 

Gotchaye

Member
I guess to rephrase I'm saying the average person might not see this as libertarian thought, and if it is it might not be contradictory. To speak personally I haven't payed attention to many high profile boycotts or firings like this so when you say a law would be good I wonder how this actually maximizes liberty. Is this a widespread problem? There's also plenty of things people do voluntarily that probably minimize liberty but aren't illegal, so what makes this particularly important?

Well, there's one anecdote right upthread where Manmademan points out that in his government office the rule is basically "employees are not allowed to post anything controversial to social media". Government jobs have a pretty big problem with this in general. You get occasional stories about teachers getting fired because parents don't like what twenty-somethings do for fun. I would guess that a really large number of employees self-censor what they non-anonymously post online because of concerns about this, though I don't have numbers. But I don't think I need numbers to say that the sort of argument you actually get from liberals about free speech and employment is not very liberal, though them being unaware of a bigger problem could explain why they don't seem to have thought much about the issue.

As for how important this is, I think from a liberal perspective this just depends on how important you think free speech is. Obviously it's pretty easy to rhetorically downplay the importance of being able to say controversial things, but the arguments for why free speech is a good thing are old and easy to find and I don't really see the need to get into them. My argument here is that liberals don't have good reasons to distinguish in the way that they often do between the government suppressing speech and employers (including in some cases the government acting as an employer) suppressing speech.

I actually feel like modern liberalism tries to do quite a bit to maximize liberty, with some limits to just how much redistribution we're willing to do or how much we're willing to help poor people in other countries. The things you can't touch are the things where enforcing the law would itself be more of an imposition on liberty than what you're trying to correct. So, like, you could make an argument here that employers just have a really important freedom-of-association right to employ whoever they want, but this would not be very persuasive because in general liberals don't seem to feel like this is actually a really important feature of the employer-employee relationship - that's why liberals like anti-discrimination laws. On the other hand, it is bad that racists don't want to associate socially with the people they're bigoted against, but people's right to hang out with whoever they want is really important and we're not going to try to legislate and micromanage that people not be racists in deciding who they're friends with. What things do you have in mind?

This is probably the last from me for a while because I lost my home internet connection and won't have it back on for a little while.
 

Boke1879

Member
Cuban is definitely going to be laughing to himself during this shit.

If he brings up Cuban or how unfair the debate it on the debate stage he'll look absolutely terrible
 
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