If we were to discuss politics at work at any length we would be at immediate risk of losing valuable people. We all pretty much know where we stand on politics, and it is not together. And many of us feel very strongly about our irreconcilable positions. But by carefully not talking about them (or engaging when someone less in tune starts) we get along just fine. That's not official policy but it is a good one.
This is exactly the argument for privacy. Privacy is about agreed lines because we know that there are some places where we just won't get along. The "if you have nothing to hide" argument assumes that you want to see the things that I'm hiding. In this case, people are hiding their political affiliation (or at least their explicitly expressed opinions) because we know that if it was shared, all of our lives would be harder.
It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial. At scale, anything is political. The only solution is to keep politics out of business, and manifest our political opinions through government. Business, like economics or biology, is dismal. The most efficient and productive continue on.
Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.
> It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial.
No, the existence of controversy over an issue is a question of empirical fact, not political opinion.
The ascription of significance to the existence of controversy may be a political opinion (and is certainly a value-based opinion), but not the question of whether controversy exists.
If it's an empirical fact, how much objection from how many (and which) people is enough to cross the line into controversial? You can always find at least one upset person about any significant decision of any company, thus it's inherently political when you decide which group of people or how big a group you have to have to merit the "controversial" badge.
Those complaining of being deplatformed would probably agree strongly with your definition, however, so I will admit the definition of this word is itself controversial. Or maybe I shouldn't, because the prior sentence feels very political to me.
> If it's an empirical fact, how much objection from how many (and which) people is enough to cross the line into controversial?
Any. Controversial is a continuous-valued, not binary, attribute.
How controversial is enough to justify a particular reaction? That's a political judgement, and in practice has as much to do with where you stand on the controversy as how much controversy there is.
How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
We have an issue system - instead of "Bob always leaves his mess to clean up" if you have a problem your supposed to put it in generic terms like "kitchen is sometimes left a mess" and then put a counter measure: "kitchen cleaning trainig and checklist".
If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it.
We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was.
He put it in the issue tracking system and we now have a public skill system and renumeration scale.
Not saying that this can't work in practice, but it sounds a bit passive-aggresive to me. I'd imagine if someone has some feedback for me, they'd talk to me directly instead of leaving a ticket in an issue tracker. You already mentioned that your company is small and this system has worked for you so far, but I doubt this will work at Facebook scale.
Does it also have a sexual harrasment policy, or is the response to one employee reporting that another groped them going to be "you're fired"? As is traditional?
And this is the reason things have changed so much:
Step 1: first, identify truly evil people (like self-avowed white supremacists)
Step 2: find a unfalsifable or weak method to associate non-evil people with the evil ones.
Step 3: once this method becomes part of the zeitguist, infer the association implies agreement.
Step 4: once agreement is assumed when stating the association, imply the person's agreement is in the realm of intolerance or hatred.
Step 5: once a person is assumed to have hateful or intolerant beliefs due to the association, 'intolerance of intolerance' kicks in and it's no longer considered ethical to do anything other than push that person out of the public sphere, or, as this comment does, claim they are not free to hold their beliefs quietly. (despite the fact, of course, that these beliefs aren't the ones they have, but the ones projected onto them via the tactics of the previous steps.)
Through this mechanism you can pull anyone you want into the realm of being cancellable or ostricized, once you find a suitable associative vector. The vectors being used today are quite weak, such as being seen in a photograph with someone, sharing news from a website of a particular political slant, or even using a specific phrase.
I guess so, but it's not really an interesting question because it's so easy.
Humans are (somewhat) pre-disposed to form in-groups and out-groups, and clearly those people are worse than us.
The only real difference between pre-internet and post-internet is that it's much, much easier for fringe ideas to spread (and often this is good, like gay rights were a fringe idea twenty years ago).
However, we don't get only the good (for whatever your definition of good is) stuff, we also get people who particular in-groups don't like organising, and this sucks. But everyone's out-group is someone else's in-group, so unless you can solve humanity, you're not going to fix Facebook.
To be fair though, I trace the divisions in American society mostly from the decline of the Fairness Doctrine, and all the downstream consequences of that (specific channels for particular worldviews leading to increased radicalisation).
Read up on rhetoric, hard sales tactics and CIA/KGB sabotage. Here's a fun little one from the OSS that's still used in 2020:
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
The mechanism you describe here is known as "kafkatrapping"[1]. There's discussion in the article comments where it's agreed that the best way to combat this is to call out the person setting up the kafkatrap by telling them what a kafkatrap is, and to disregard their statement/question entirely since it's irrational & circular logic to begin with.
A witch-hunt or a witch purge is a search for people who have been labelled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft, and it often involves a moral panic or mass hysteria...
In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of intimidating political opponents.
Yup. This is worthy of a top comment. That’s exactly how it works. Things will never get better if everyone keeps ostracizing people they disagree with. My family is Republican, Libertarian, and Democrat. No greens yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We have great conversations and no one thinks anyone is Hitler or Pol Pot. I really hope the current zeitgeist dies a quick death.
And yet the elected leaders of one party have made it their crusade to deny access to abortion and make it harder to obtain contraception, believe that being gay or trans is a disease that can be fixed by therapy and that they should be excluded from the military, try their hardest to put roadblocks in front of several minority groups who just want to vote (and have flat-out admitted that the reason is because when more people vote, their party loses), strategically redraw voting districts to ensure they remain in power (often against the majority or significant minority), believe that women reporting sexual harassment and abuse are just looking for attention, think that systemic sexism and racism doesn't exist, hypocritically fight against immigration that has enriched them and enriches the country, and worse. I could go on, but we'd be here all day.
Note that I didn't say anything about white supremacists or nazis above. This is the party platform, and people who support that party either support -- or at least aren't strongly enough against -- these policies. And I really can't tolerate the attitude of "I want lower taxes and less regulation and smaller government so much that I'm going to vote in people who want to deny certain people their rights". I don't think these people are nazis, but I am continually disappointed that they make choices to enrich themselves at the expense of others. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, and many voters end up misunderstanding the effects of some policies to the point that they're actually voting against their own interests anyway.
I won't claim that the other party is all rainbows and virtue, or that they don't pull dirty tricks when they get the chance, but at least they generally don't try to take people's civil (and voting!) rights away or advance laws based on religious beliefs that discriminate against minority groups. It's telling that nearly all of the things I dislike about the Democrat party platform (expansion of surveillance state, willingness to invade foreign nations, lack of respect for due process, war on drugs, tough on crime) just happens to be shared across both parties, and often the Republican party takes a much more extreme stance on those issues.
I will also absolutely agree with you that cancel culture has gotten out of hand to the point of having a chilling effect on discussion that could be productive, critical, and worthwhile. And many people do make the awful, lazy, polarizing associations that you describe ("white supremacists are far-right so all conservatives must be white supremacists"). It's lame and I hate it. But let's not pretend that means that there aren't serious issues with the right's attitude toward civil rights, freedom from religion, equity and equality, social justice, criminal justice, and other things. If you vote Republican, you're voting for those things, even if you don't actively support them. We certainly shouldn't ostracize or alienate people who we don't agree with, or refuse to talk to them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call out people for supporting reprehensible policy.
