You may be right! However, imagine you were an employer of this gentleman and you saw this video. Would you keep him, realizing that there is a possibility he might do something like this on the job one day? And that your company would be dragged through the social media mud if you didn’t fire him, putting all the other employees at risk? That’s what probably went through the mind of the head of the company that employed this gentleman.
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I’m not sure I see the reason to turn a blind eye. Sure, people could get away with being dicks more often in the past because it tended to revolve around heresay and we needed to give people the benefit of the doubt before sanctioning them.
But if it happens in print or on camera, there’s little doubt. Humans have always been sanctioning one another for behaviour outside of the accepted norms. It only feels like a shitty thing because the lack of a social safety net makes the consequences so severe. But that shouldn’t be a shield against bad behaviour. What about any black people who work at that company? Should they have to continue to work alongside this idiot, just because his widely publicised remarks were “off the clock”? Now that would be some fucked up shit right there.
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Yeah, I understand.
This reminds me of why my plan is to never create a forum or social networking account under my own name ever again. Back in the day (80s and 90s) those of us on BBS sites used handles and nicknames to hide who we were. It seems like this is going to come back (in the face of “real name” policies) if you can get screwed for having a bad opinion online or acting out in a legal way (but still possibly a dumb one).
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Sure but what some people consider dickish or bad behavior is completely acceptable to some. Hence my use of the leather association or my friend who was gay back in the day.
I don’t care if people are kinky or queer but maybe they care in Duluth. If I find out my employee is into S/M and it is public, should it be cool to fire him or her? That’s not a protected class so I suppose it is legal…
I work with evangelical Christians who spend their free time witnessing to people, even within the Open Source community, via blog posts, forum posts, etc. I still have to work side by side with them (as do my gay coworkers), while said Christians write anti-Gay Marriage posts on their blogs.
So, yeah, you work with who you work with…
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With the long memory of the Internet, the lack of control what other people post about you, and the notoriously shifty sands of what The Public considers acceptable, I’d go straight for appalled.
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This is just a slippery slope argument. This guy was making a racist verbal attack. It was an act of harm done to another human being.
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So it is illegal then and he was prosecuted? The police came and got him?
No, they didn’t because it wasn’t illegal.
Seems like protected speech to me and, yes, I’ve already said it is a slippery slope argument.
You’re not really making a good case for your viewpoint here.
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I mean, the CEO of my company was hounded out of his job by Internet outrage because people found out he (legally) donated money to an anti-gay marriage initiative here in California.
Did it make him a dick? Possibly.
We live in a time of outrage and people must be punished for having bad opinions. That’s already something that is difficult to deal with. To then think it is acceptable to extend that to “and you should lose your job for wrongthink” seems to be bad. I mean, we’re discussing things that aren’t illegal, just unpopular and possibly offensive.
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Yeesh. Way to perpetuate stereotypes, Oklahoma>. Stay Classy.
ETA - It’s in PA. Sorry. I must be tired…
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And so turn that around. If what the employer did was wrong, he can go to the cops. But then you already said upthread that you weren’t concerned whether it was legal or not, but whether it was an appropriate thing to do. What’s good for the goose…
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Well, then I hope you never misstep in public or online…the Internet is watching you, Luke Stirling. Conform!
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I am proud of my race: the human race. Actually, most of the time… well, some of the time anyway, OK occasionally, sometimes, rarely, definitely not now of course, but… Like I was saying I am rarely proud of the human race, myself included. Obviously not of this guy. Sadly, I looked at the comments.
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This troubled me as well. I think the proper action would be to protect people from action against them based on their religion, race, sexual orientation, disability, probably others. However, I don’t think there should be a restriction on employers severing their relationship with employees who show in such a public manner that they are such foul people.
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Yes it is. People always have been. Pretending that this is something new just because it scales up bewilders me. The good old days before this were just simply the times where people could get away with being racist, bigoted assholes, not because of protected speech, but because there was no collective memory for these thing.
Free speech doesn’t protect you from the consequences of the things you say, and it never has. It just means that such speech acts are not illegal. Things you say have always had the capacity to ruin your life and get you shunned by the community at large.
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This whole notion of “milking my tax dollars” is so petty and short sighted. Of the amount you or I or this guy pay in tax dollars every year, how much actually goes to social programs like welfare? It’s like this guy has a chip on his shoulder against “lazy people” because he lost all his pocket change from a hole in his pants. Does he have a problem with his tax dollars going to “corporate welfare” subsidies to the very industry he works for, so it’s like he’s paying to have a job? And of course a lot of what he pays goes to Social Security (which he will get back), Medicare (which he will probably need at some point) and the military (which is so wasteful it’s beyond belief.)
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[quote=“albill, post:28, topic:71400”]We live in a time of outrage and people must be punished for having bad opinions.
[/quote]
Well, at least John Pisone didn’t ask for Likes, Shares, and prayers for a dog with ham on its face.
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It is. And the statewide nondiscrimination law currently doesn’t cover the characteristic of odious idiot.
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I dunno. You can’t find anything I wrote on the Internet, outside of a tiny handful of things, before about 2000. This is even in stuff that is indexed and on Google. Why? Well, we didn’t use our legal names then.
All this stuff will do is bring pseudoanonymity back. It won’t change people’s speech.
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It definitely made him a dick.
What employer wants to hold onto the pending HR lawsuit this guy represents? Especially one stupid enough to provide his own documentation?
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So donating to a legal political campaign in your state is a “pending HR lawsuit?”
Interesting.
He wasn’t fired, since you clearly don’t know the case. He wound up quitting because of the PR shitstorm and wanting the company to not be mired in it. “Hounded out of his job” is the term we use.
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