Hey, I’m typing with my thumbs here.
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I’ve had enough anatomy out of you today!!! 
OK, subjective interpretations of being an asshole on your own time is a slight red herring, as you are leading with in this conversation. Calling a black man to his face “Nigger!” has crossed the line of subjectivity and has passed well into objectivity. When you call someone a nigger, you are objectively being an asshole. There is no subjectivity there.
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Unfortunately, large swaths of certain demographics might not agree.
P.S. I just came back from the gym too.
They are not violating his First Amendment rights by firing him. If they stopped him from saying what he wanted, if they silenced or censored him, then they could be guilty of that. But a private business, particularly in a right-to-work state, can fire you just because you bring bad publicity to them. He is free to say what he wants, no one has stopped him. They are free to fire him. And for the people stating that a union would have kept him from being fired, that is not necessarily true. Unless he’s a cop. Then I have no doubt his “guild” would have to power to get him off for pretty much anything (/exaggeration for effect).
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we were harassing no one. we were chanting a variety of slogans but we were otherwise being peaceful.
i find it very interesting that you have nothing to say about the fact of the harassment of women trying to get an abortion or the fact that i could have been fired for my participation in a peaceful protest or that the protesters in the video could have been fired for their participation in demonstrating against fracking. you seem to want to deprive assholes with whom you disagree of their rights while maintaining the rights of those with whom you agree. and let me tell you, being from an area where there is a lot of fracking, many if not most of the people in my community would regard the anti-fracking protesters as assholes whether they were peaceful or not because to them those protesters are trying to drive away jobs and money from their community. that is not my opinion but i know my neighbors and my relatives. what you are leaving out of your equation is the fact that being an asshole is often a matter of context and point of view, and while i think the guy was being an asshole i am not so quick as you to deprive him of his employment using logic which otherwise could very easily be applied to my employment.
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i think you are speaking to freebrid123 with this statement more than to me but let there be no confusion, i regard the rulings the court has made regarding free speech and protest to give me leave to participate in black lives matter demonstrations without fear. i volunteered as an escort at a planned parenthood clinic in colorado when i was younger and i regard those self-proclaimed “counselors” shouting and using bullhorns from 5 feet away as miserable, indeed execrable, excuses for humanity, but i still regard them as having the right to their opinions and their right to express them legally. do not for one minute think that i condone the content of either the abortion protesters words or what that asshole was saying to the fracking protesters but i do admit to their right to the expression of their opinions within the constraints of the law and relative jurisprudence. grudgingly do i admit it at times, but i still accept they have their rights.
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I strongly dislike that fact, actually. I didn’t think I had to emphasize it. I agree that peaceful protesting should not result in anything negative and doesn’t fall into the same camp, and the line is very clear and we shouldn’t let the bad guys try to conflate it.
I’m just pointing out that while behaving peacefully should NOT result in somebody losing their employment… that doesn’t mean that when people are harassing other people they haven’t crossed a completely different line. That’s NOT peaceful and it’s not personal.
So again, the line is ‘harassing somebody else who is behaving peacefully’. Not ‘doing something that other people disagree with but isn’t causing anybody any harm.’
Harassing peaceful people = bad. Should not be protected speech
Anything done peacefully, personally, or between consenting adults = totally cool, nobody should be able to say a thing about it.
That’s all I’m trying to say here. The logic should NOT be applied to your employment if you’re not doing the sorts of things he did to other non-consenting people
And the point that others make is that it shouldn’t be applied to your employment at all unless it somehow actually relates to your work and that folks cheering here wouldn’t be doing so (or won’t in the future) when someone for a cause they agree with is fired publicly for it.
They came for the racists, but I wasn’t a racist, so my free speech wasn’t threatened…
etc.
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And I think that’s the wrong way to look at it and STRONGLY disagree that it should suddenly be excusable if it was somebody on ‘my side’. I think that’s hypocritical and inconsistent.
The line should not be ‘work relevant’. That’s not what I believe at all nor do I approve of the whole ‘it only should matter if it’s bad publicity’ bit.
Instead I think it should be It should be ‘harassing peaceful people who aren’t consenting to said harassment’. And not ‘crossing that line should result in firing’ but ‘crossing that line should be when you aren’t protected anymore and should have reason to feel like you fucked up’
Civility isn’t a complicated concept and it applies specifically to interactions with other people, so there’s no slippery slope when looked at from that direction. Sure you can find the occasional grey area (escalating conflicts, of course) and there should be room to acknowledge that things are generally more situational than universal. but I’m also not saying ‘they should be instantly fired’, just ‘harassing peaceful people should not be protected like personal and peaceful behaviors should’.
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You’re harassing me right now! What’s your HR’s email?
…
exactly.
Again, that’s why I prefer the legal standard and leave the subjective opinion making about what constitutes bad behavior out of it.
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Have you ever had someone try to get you fired, actively, for something you said on the Internet?
I’ve seen it both tried and I’ve seen it actually succeed. Once, it might have been warranted but I’ve also seen a lynch mob pop up when it wasn’t and try to get someone fired.
I have no real trust that people will get this right.
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Me either.
There is no 100% correct-all-the-time solution here. A company should not be prevented from firing people it doesn’t like having around anymore. And there is a competing right for the individual to speak his or her mind. Competing rights, and no easy clear solution like “don’t kill anybody.”
For the case cited in the original post, the guy was over a cultural line and well on his way to being over a legal line. The cultural line was common decency. The legal line was hate speech that poses an imminent danger, which is not protected by the First Amendment.
I believe a company should be within its rights to terminate someone it doesn’t like anymore. I do not believe a company should only be able to fire people that cross a legal line. Damage to a company can occur well short of illegal activity. So a company needs to be able to mitigate damage and not have its hands tied.
Yeah, yeah, we all hate companies here and the corporatist bullshit. But I’m going to tell you that a lot of good stuff comes from companies and people who believe in a good mission. Not all companies are good and I am not going to give you a list of the good ones and the bad ones. I am going say that a good company needs tools in its toolbox to remain good. Firing assholes is a big one, and I am all for it.
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I was specifically talking about in person and not over the internet. The internet was never brought up.
Can we stick to the actual scenario, which was always in-person direct harassment. Yes, other things are bad, but I wasn’t talking about them and you’re really running with those goalposts.
We have a clear video of the scenario I was talking about. It’s what the whole thread is about and it never has strayed from in-person interactions.
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Well, not for you or in your opinion. I have applied it more broadly throughout.
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Well, are you done arguing that in-person harassment deserves protection or that not protecting it will somehow lead to personal, private, or activities between consenting adults being diminished?
Because I’m amazed that you brought up this bit[quote=“enso, post:253, topic:71400”]
They came for the racists, but I wasn’t a racist, so my free speech wasn’t threatened…etc.
[/quote]
Again, it was the harassment, the not leaving when the people who were behaving peacefully asked, and the calling the cameraman a ni**er and making chimp noises that made it pretty obvious we were well past any ‘oh, he thinks differently’ lines. I made it clear that this is about CIVILITY, not about ‘sides’
I also said…
So no, that clearly has nothing to do with where I was coming from. I’m trying to figure out if you’re being deliberately obtuse or really not reading and comprehending the posts you’re replying to.
And as for the internet argument, people can hack other peoples’ accounts, they can set up fake identities, and pull all kinds of shenanigans. Obviously reason has to be a factor here (another simple concept that people seem to think is all fancy and confusing) and the burden would have to be a hell of a lot higher, wouldn’t it? Plus there’s bound to be tons of context so the gulf between somebody having an argument and somebody stalking somebody or promoting ‘how to kill minorities’ videos repeatedly is pretty broad.
Not that corporations NEED to have a ton of reason to let somebody go, especially since most of us are contractor crazy if we’re not in work free States…but again they shouldn’t concern themselves with peaceful activities or things that don’t harm others.
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Exactly.
Very agreed. A company doesn’t HAVE to be ‘evil’, and they shouldn’t be (and in most States aren’t) forced to keep anybody on the payroll.
A ‘no assholes allowed’ policy is the sort of thing that lots of us are all for, and I have no problem not being an asshole 24/7 if that means everybody I work with is held to the same standard (I assume non-assholes will be reasonable in how they implement such things, of course, that’d be a criteria). That’s worth at least 20K a year to me.
Hell, give me an entire campus of non-assholes and an asshole-free apartment complex and I’ll barely leave and be as happy as a clam.
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You know that clams are assholes, right?
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Or not playing the game you want played for your particular argument?
I wasn’t aware that you got to set the terms of what is discussed here and how.
Carry on, then.
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This is Illegal where I live so maybe I’d suggest that where a company can fire a person because said person is an embarrassment, not firing this asshole *can be * construed as tacit acceptance of that person’s behavior (even when firing him doesn’t necessarily state a company’s position either way). However, if companies were explicitly prohibited from firing someone for behavior outside the workplace then it wouldn’t reflect badly on said company to keep an outspoken racist on the payroll and firing someone would always necessarily be a moral stance the company decides to take.
Should he now become unemployable? The video went viral and could come back to haunt him anytime.
I don’t personally care he got fired. Great, hope he learns a lesson. I care that companies pretend to care about social issues but only act to cover their asses while maintaining status quo.
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Unfortunately, it seems like most people just see an asshole who got what he deserves and larger social issues around employment and personal behavior outside of work be damned.
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