Cancelling Dr. Seuss

[marshwiggle]

And lest my fears of the tattletale zeitgeist seem overblown:

Open Season on the Faculty

Proposed legislation in Iowa would require the state's Board of Regents to survey all employees of the three universities it oversees as to their political party affiliations, disaggregating the data by job classification but not by individual. The regents would deliver the information to state lawmakers by the end of the calendar year.

The bill doesn't provide an explanation, and Jim Carlin, the Republican state senator who introduced it, didn't respond to a request for comment. But the meaning is clear: by disaggregating employee groups, Iowa's General Assembly could measure the political beliefs of the faculty.

In Iowa and elsewhere in recent years, Republican state lawmakers have lamented what they describe as academe's lack of intellectual or ideological diversity.

In 2017, for instance, another Iowa Republican state legislator proposed an ultimately unsuccessful bill that would have prevented regents institutions from hiring professors who caused the "percentage of the faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by 10 percent" the share of the faculty belonging to the other dominant party. Under that bill, Iowa's commissioner of elections was to provide voter registration data to colleges and universities once a year. Carlin's new bill represents a new way of getting at that party affiliation data.

At the time, faculty members across Florida wondered what would happen if they refused to answer questions about their political beliefs. Would they be punished, for instance?

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education this week launched a new legal defense fund and 24-7 hotline for public college and university faculty members, citing a rise in threats of censorship and punishment for speech and research.

And even though we come from different parts of the political spectrum, I find this just as problematic as you.  Policing people for ideology is a very bad idea, even if the supposed goal is to ensure diversity of thought.

[mahagonny]

Well mahagonny, before you engage too eagerly in a revenge fantasy pertaining to the "woke crowd" (what is that anyway?) I was rather thinking of someone like myself who would agree almost point-by-point with Caracal on most things, if not this one.

Not that long ago I found myself in a raucous online debate with a grandmother who lives somewhere up there in the frozen upper Midwest.  The subject was Donald Trump.  The last thing she said to me before she logged off was, and I quote, "You'll get your comeuppance." 

She was actually fantasizing (pertaining to the woke crowd) about a civil war and military tribunals, but I absolutely guarantee you that had she had found out that I was a *dreaded-socialist- academic-who-indoctrinated-the-youth-with-Marxism-or-some-such-dross* at a state university she would have looked for my head on a platter (maybe literally). 

The internet allows us all to be tattletales and expect our own peeves to result in (yes, this is the right word) punishment.

Without knowing the grandmother from the midwest, I can still speculate about her possible frame of mind. For tens of millions of voters, when you (not you, wahoo, but anyone) says they must be racist because they either
didn't vote for Obama
didn't like Obama's policies, hoped they would falter and eventually be scrapped
wondered whether he was born in the USA before hearing all the available facts
voted against Hillary with certainty
are not jumping for joy because the USA now has a "woman of color" Veep
watch Rush Limbaugh
what they hear is you mean they are racist in the worst, fullest sense of the word. That they both harbor implicit, unrecognized racism, and have conscious thought level racism that they enjoy. And when you do something like that, you're playing with dynamite. And really, I can only shake my head in astonishment at people who fail to see this, or think it's responsible citizenship. And you probably never called her a racist, but it doesn't even matter at this point.

[Wahoo Redux]

Well M., this grandmother insists that voter fraud won Biden the job despite extensive evidence to the contrary, and she hopes that people with guns will take over the government and put people like me out of business.  We never discussed race. 

I don't know if Trump is really a racist in the generally accept definition of the term, but she sure had no trouble playing the race-implication card.

[mahagonny]

Well M., this grandmother insists that voter fraud won Biden the job despite extensive evidence to the contrary, and she hopes that people with guns will take over the government and put people like me out of business.  We never discussed race. 

I don't know if Trump is really a racist in the generally accept definition of the term, but she sure had no trouble playing the race-implication card.

As I suspected, she's madder than a hornet for being called a racist for four years by almost everyone in the media, after being asked to vote, by the media. Common sense, man.

[Wahoo Redux]

Maybe she should examine her beliefs.  Common sense, you know.

[financeguy]

Or maybe those levying that particular charge should stop expanding the use of words such that whatever is needed to score a political point becomes definitional. Remember that anyone is a racist is the definition is broadened enough. We're up to pretty much the entire white population now so at a certain point the word may cease to have any punch. It's kind of like how the F word used to shock, but now one needs to use the C word and even that's becoming commonplace. Even if your goal is to hold a race card over the head of others to score political points, the frequent and expanded use of that card is diminishing its power. Even those on the left have been saying to drop the frivolous complaints and direct that energy to real issues, but a fish is gonna swim, hatters gonna hate, and the woke will virtue signal to their own detriment.

[mahagonny]

Maybe she should examine her beliefs.  Common sense, you know.

We all should. Just ask around and people will tell you!! Cheers

[Caracal]

I anticipated this response.  I almost preemptively posted but my posts tend to be too long already.

We DO protect people in the employment sphere for things that are not directly job related.

If I went to Facebook and said...

I have converted to Catholicism / Buddhism / etc....
I am gay...
I am marrying an African American / Native American / etc....
I am pregnant (impossible for me but just hypothetically speaking)...
I found out my parents are immigrants...

...and I was fired I am protected, even if a pregnant-gay-Catholic-Buddhist-African / Native-American-son-of-immigrants may damage the image of my employer in some people's eyes.

I got this idea some years ago after dinner with a colleague whose wife was one of those liberal pot-smoking lawyers who, during a discussion about a school teacher who had lost her job because some parent found Facebook party-pics from her college days, said very simply, "The laws are not keeping up."

I am sure you are right that this might be "new legal territory"...but everything above was at one point new legal territory.  Social media is new territory.  Maybe we need laws for new territories.

And no, I think an employer can take action the moment a person's beliefs affect their employment , not before.  Free expression should be sacrosanct.

I agree with parts of this. You're right, of course, that some things are protected. That's why the legal term is protected categories. There are particular things you cannot fire people for. Everything else is allowed. You can fire someone because they pick their nose in meetings, but you can't fire them because they were a veteran.

It is really screwed up when people get fired because of some picture. I have similar feelings about the unearthing of racist tweets from when, now famous, people were seventeen. Just because we live in a world where people's casual, juvenile racism is preserved, doesn't mean we have to assume it reflects their current beliefs.

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't. If we go back to the examples much earlier, I think racist speech by police officers goes directly to their suitability for their job. If I was an employer, I would certainly think that a person who screams racial abuse at strangers on the streets is probably going to not be someone you want working at your business.

I'm not sure this is a problem that can really be solved by laws-maybe some elements of it could be addressed, but I think most of this is just about the messy process of adapting to new technologies, new ideas of privacy and accessibility and chaining ideas around acceptable behavior.

[marshwiggle]

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't. If we go back to the examples much earlier, I think racist speech by police officers goes directly to their suitability for their job. If I was an employer, I would certainly think that a person who screams racial abuse at strangers on the streets is probably going to not be someone you want working at your business.

This kind of hyperbole makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion. Of course someone who screams abuse at strangers isn't a good choice for an employee; the person probably has some sort of a mental illness. But in our current society, many people would equate something like wearing a MAGA hat with screaming abuse at strangers. The total unwillingness by many to judge behaviour differently from perceived intent is the problem.

[mahagonny]

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't. If we go back to the examples much earlier, I think racist speech by police officers goes directly to their suitability for their job. If I was an employer, I would certainly think that a person who screams racial abuse at strangers on the streets is probably going to not be someone you want working at your business.

This kind of hyperbole makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion. Of course someone who screams abuse at strangers isn't a good choice for an employee; the person probably has some sort of a mental illness. But in our current society, many people would equate something like wearing a MAGA hat with screaming abuse at strangers. The total unwillingness by many to judge behaviour differently from perceived intent is the problem.

Re: "screaming racial abuse at strangers" (which of course can only mean while against black): If you read what the some of the most dishonest leaders of the woke, 'antiracist' community write, Charles Blow at NYT et al, you can see that their attitude is if something was happening in 1960 or before, you can describe the incident with vivid drama, then connect it with a magical, seamless segue, to how we are supposed to feel about race relations today, as though it is still happening.  Good outrage need never go to waste. Evidently they think we're dumb.

[Caracal]

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't. If we go back to the examples much earlier, I think racist speech by police officers goes directly to their suitability for their job. If I was an employer, I would certainly think that a person who screams racial abuse at strangers on the streets is probably going to not be someone you want working at your business.

This kind of hyperbole makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion. Of course someone who screams abuse at strangers isn't a good choice for an employee; the person probably has some sort of a mental illness. But in our current society, many people would equate something like wearing a MAGA hat with screaming abuse at strangers. The total unwillingness by many to judge behaviour differently from perceived intent is the problem.

That was referencing one of the actual news articles upthread presented as an example of someone fired for their beliefs. It involved an actual person screaming racial abuse at a stranger on the street who got fired as a result. I very much doubt they would have been fired for wearing a MAGA hat...

[Wahoo Redux]

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't.

This is why we need laws that protect our speech off-the-clock.  How do you determine what speech is safe for your employer?  The police officer who posted support for her niece at a BLM rally----that example could not be any better.

As I said, the line should be when behavior directly affects employment on-the-clock, not before.

Your anti-racism police officer has the right to an opinion.  Even your racist police officer has a right to an opinion, like it or not.  You see your employee screaming invective on the street?----tough noogies.  That is your employee's right.  I'll say a simple idea one more time: The minute we allow corporate entities to police our language and our beliefs we are in very dangerous territory. 

I think you have ideas about what people should say and be allowed to say. 

And the bigger problem is that, yeah, the internet allows us to unearth 20-year-old adolescent behavior or our idiotic moments, and these can badly damage us.  Zeitgeist. 

[Caracal]

However, the problem I see with your proposal is that I can't see how you can create some clear line about what speech does affect employment and which doesn't.

This is why we need laws that protect our speech off-the-clock.  How do you determine what speech is safe for your employer?  The police officer who posted support for her niece at a BLM rally----that example could not be any better.

As I said, the line should be when behavior directly affects employment on-the-clock, not before.

Your anti-racism police officer has the right to an opinion.  Even your racist police officer has a right to an opinion, like it or not.  You see your employee screaming invective on the street?----tough noogies.  That is your employee's right.  I'll say a simple idea one more time: The minute we allow corporate entities to police our language and our beliefs we are in very dangerous territory. 

I think you have ideas about what people should say and be allowed to say. 

And the bigger problem is that, yeah, the internet allows us to unearth 20-year-old adolescent behavior or our idiotic moments, and these can badly damage us.  Zeitgeist.

I certainly do have ideas about what people should say. I believe in free speech, but I don't believe in consequence free speech. I'm not crazy about employers policing speech as a general principal, but there are times where it would be absurd to ignore it. The problem is that it isn't just about the employer. I'm fine with working with people I disagree with about things, but I'm not ok working with a guy who screams racial invective on the street, even if I'm not the group he's targeting. As Marshwiggle said, that's an unstable person who might be a danger.

The racist police officer does have the right to his opinion, but he doesn't have the right to openly express racist ideas and be a police officer. That's a person who is a danger to many of the people he's supposed to be protecting and who pay his salary with their taxes. Now, I think there's a need for clear regulations that define what kind of speech should be protected for police officers. Those regulations should protect someone from, for example, expressing ideas about black lives matter movements, whether positive or negative, as long as those ideas aren't something like "those protestors should all be shot."

Even Academic free speech, which gives pretty broad protections, does have its limits, as it should. A professor who writes on Twitter "jews always cheat on exams" is essentially announcing that he can't be trusted to treat students fairly.

[Wahoo Redux]

As Marshwiggle said, that's an unstable person who might be a danger.

"might?"  Or they might NOT be "a danger." So we fire and limit people based on predictions?  Is that fair or safe? 

Again, there are many people who believe we are "a danger," maybe not in the assaultive sense (which seems to be what frightens you) but in a moral and philosophic sense.  You want to give them the power to silence us by threatening what we do for a living?

The racist police officer does have the right to his opinion, but he doesn't have the right to openly express racist ideas and be a police officer. That's a person who is a danger to many of the people he's supposed to be protecting and who pay his salary with their taxes.

So if a devout Catholic police officer expresses orthodox prolife sentiments, may we assume she or he would neglect to protect prochoice protestors?  Seems to me we cannot trust this police officer.

Now, I think there's a need for clear regulations that define what kind of speech should be protected for police officers. Those regulations should protect someone from, for example, expressing ideas about black lives matter movements, whether positive or negative, as long as those ideas aren't something like "those protestors should all be shot."

Well...specifically, that is NOT what is happening.  In fact, just exactly the opposite is happening.

Even Academic free speech, which gives pretty broad protections, does have its limits, as it should. A professor who writes on Twitter "jews always cheat on exams" is essentially announcing that he can't be trusted to treat students fairly.

Firstly, you cannot make that sort of determination, even with extreme expression as evidence.  We all say things.     

Secondly, expression is sacrosanct.  It is a cornerstone of American civilization.  It is actually more important than the possibility that someone might do something bad.  Again, we have mechanisms to rectify and combat bad people's bad actions.  Now you want to silence their ideas? 

It's interesting to think about, but did it ever occur to you that you drive these bigotries and hatreds underground.  Certainly a few crazies write something like "all jews cheat on tests," generally under a pseudonym, and some might get caught at it----but these ideas do not disappear just because you will not tolerate their expression.   

Do you think your limitations and restrictions are going to change anything for the better?

[Caracal]

Secondly, expression is sacrosanct.  It is a cornerstone of American civilization.  It is actually more important than the possibility that someone might do something bad.  Again, we have mechanisms to rectify and combat bad people's bad actions.  Now you want to silence their ideas? 


Do you think your limitations and restrictions are going to change anything for the better?

You keep saying you know that the first amendment just applies to governments, but then you write stuff like this and I don't now if you do. Free expression doesn't mean you can't get fired for your beliefs or for things you say. It has never meant that. There never has been some principle that everyone can say anything they want and not face consequences for it. That's not what people like J.S Mill thought. its just something you've made up.