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What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards? What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
I am a physician, I have beliefs that are mainstream in this country that would result in me being removed from promotion consideration, teaching, and could lose me my license.
Fired? Maybe, maybe not - certainly put under a microscope and given zero slack.
I didn't vote for Trump this last time in spite of interest in doing so because I was afraid that I'd be tired one day, lose my poker face and reveal who I voted for.
It's possible I am being histrionic, but I truly believe this - and I know lots of other physicians and working professionals in big name companies who believe the same thing.
In 2Way Morning Meeting yesterday some guy from a big four firm nearly broke down telling the same kind of story. Blue regions are littered with people like us and we are just about done.
And you think that if the hostile work environment doctrine were removed then you'd feel free to speak your views? Or is this just the zeitgeist among people you happen to work for?
It is the impression of some people that items like this are the cudgel used. Is it really? Is it the only one? I don't know the answer, presumably they can come up with any legal fiction they want to get rid of the undesirables, on the other hand systems follow incentives and if the system feels like it is required to use this tool against a specific group it will.
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
Pulling out one specific detail of the administrative apparatus of oppression and litigating it is potentially academically interesting but isn't going to help with these feelings.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
I'd assert that categorically right leaning oppression is superior to left leaning oppression - the right in the last one hundred years when malformed wants you to obey or die, with the notable exception of some regimes going after minority targets. The left when malformed wants you to believe or die, with frequent spastic targeting of nearly everyone. Cultural immune system aside, Russia, China, and Cambodia were all worse than WWII Germany.
This remains true for the religious right and woke power politics, the latter is far worse and more antithetical to healthy society. While it is true that some of this is probably true because of new social technologies generated by things like social media, it was safer in the religious days with the possible exception of a few minorities.
And I think that last bit is the point - in a democracy you can oppress a minority (and ya know, usually shouldn't?) but if that minority grows powerful, influential, and numerous...it stops. And that's what happened the religious right. Society changed, they became smaller and more moderate and more open and intensely effective advocacy changed things.
In contrast these days you have a much, much, MUCH larger group of society that is being oppressed...or at least feels that way.
It isn't necessarily an accurate thing, but it is INTENSELY more destabilizing.
One example is what has happened to young white men - totally vilified, not given any support, and also the group most likely to commit violence.
I'm going to push back on the obey/believe or die spectrum. Communist Russian didn't require you to believe unless you were a party member, they just wanted you to obey. Same for Commie China. Nazi germany clearly wanted you to obey and be the right race or die.
This is a pretty big exception in that the most common culturally accepted example of right wing oppression killed 6 million people based on their minority status. I don't know enough about Pol Pot/Cambodia to make the distinction of how much they wanted you to believe vs obey.
Again I disagree, somehow the oppressive elements run by the religious majority isn't classified by you as a "believe" categorization feels biased as hell. Pretty much every other oppressive religious government (Iranian Theocracy?) requires your belief. I'm not sure why the rosy tinted glasses about an oppressive Christian government. Also forgive me for not feeling it was safer that you could get fired/ostracized from your community for playing bloodly Dungeons and Dragons...
I know you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed, and honestly I imagine the lefties still feel the cultural scars of the religious rights oppression. I don't feel that the religious right has shown any evidence of having learned from this experience and that if they return to power they will somehow say: "Let's put the super weapons back in the box, we learned that being an oppressive majority was not fun for the oppressed and have decided to be better this time around" So the lefties pretty much need to maintain power unless they want to be "killed for buttering the toast on the wrong side"
I personally prefer my tribe to do the oppressing from now on. We can call it the "Shut up, Grill and be an adult, or Die" oppression.
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I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well. But regardless, the solution seems to be to just... stop oppressing the likes of FC. Stopping oppressing such people does not, in any way, mean giving power back to the right or whatever - that'd only be the case if we presumed that the only way the left keeps power is through oppression of people like FC, which I would consider completely false. And, TBH, the opposite of what it is when the left is actually living up to its ideals; the value of the left is that it's, in some real sense better than the right, and the only way that'd be the case is if it arrives at its policy prescriptions without oppressing people who would fight against it tooth and nail; it's this ability to win over the people despite giving every leeway to its opponents that actually verifies the superiority of our ideals over those of our enemies in a liberal democracy. Without that verification, we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it. I agree that they aren't deriving power from it directly but they are flexing that power, and to quote some Fantasy/Sci-fi Author I can't remember (Our that my memory invented: "Power is alive and it seeks those who will wield it, those it can corrupt to increase the power, so that they may wield it better. Power always grows in the hands of tyrants" Power is an egregor, and all entities exist to perpetuate their own growth and existence. The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Not sure I want to wade into the discussion about the merit of the lefts vs rights values, too nebulous for me.
This forum is so tiny and uninfluential that literally everyone here could be hardcore RETVRNers or whatever, and it wouldn't really mean anything of national consequence. I do think the specter of a return of Christian conservative domination isn't completely gone, so eternal vigilance is justified. After all, in the 90s, it appeared as if the specter of open, explicit, systematic government-mandated racism and sexism were gone, but it returned with a vengeance within just a couple of decades, by the ideological allies of the folks that had turned it into a specter in the first place!
But I'd argue that the whole Moral Majority Christian Conservative thing really is just a specter right now, and if jumping at ghosts leads one to harming living people, it's one's responsibility to stop jumping at ghosts, at least until they prove themselves corporeal.
This is where some basic introspection by the left would be productive, both for discourse and for the left to self-improve. As a graduate of a liberal arts college that was almost the exact perfect stereotype of the progressive leftist breeding ground formed by critics of leftist indoctrination in academia, I find the lack of introspection to be depressing now, though I found it surprising in the past, because our ability to introspect was one of the things that we prided ourselves in as educated college students who were learning the truth about the hidden bigotry in ourselves.
By introspection, of course, I'm referring to the fact that one of the consistent strong propositions by the modern progressive left is that people can oppress others without being aware of it, due to being raised in a society that bakes in the oppression, allowing individuals to become oppressors by benefiting from the oppression in a way that's unjust to the oppressed despite the fact that these oppressors never had a single oppressive thought or feeling or emotion in their mind, body, soul, etc. There's also a somewhat well-known idea (I think this was more popular 10 years ago during the "SJW" era than it is now, during the "woke" era), "When someone is telling you you're hurting them, you can't decide that you didn't."
Now, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the people pushing forth these ideas were using them as tools with which to oppress people they disliked, but if we're being charitable, we should hold that these people really do believe what they're pushing. If they truly believe it, then they should be willing to accept the very real possibility that they're oppressing others accidentally and that the likes of FC ought to be listened to when they say that they're oppressing them.
Also, CS Lewis is an extremely well known figure, even before the film adaptations of the Wardrobe books a couple decades ago. Leftists are disproportionately more educated than rightists, IIRC, and at least the thought leaders ought to be held up to a standard high enough that they should be aware of his quotation and the dangerous game they're playing by their fight in favor of people they've labeled as "oppressed," and have credible ways to control the risks.
So your explanation makes sense. It's just a depressing one.
I disagree that there's some sort of "oppression constant" by which oppression is created to fill a vacuum when people don't keep oppressing. First of all, that puts into question the entire project of modern progressive leftism. If getting rid of Christian conservative oppression of yesteryear means that someone else will just come in and oppress us - and by oppressing us, discredit themselves as any better than our previous oppressors - in equal amounts? Second, living through the 90s and 00s, I know that a society where neither side is oppressing each other in nearly the same amounts as they have been attempting and succeeding to do over the past 1-2 decades is very possible. Maybe it can only last 10-15 years long at a time, but that's still a solid fraction of my adult life that I'd rather spend without either being oppressed by my ideological enemies or feeling ashamed of my ideological peers for being, in practice, somehow worse than my enemies, by our own values.
Ha, you'd be stealing it not from me, but from one Dr. Seuss and his
Build Back BetterBig Beautiful BillButter Battle Book. Another book that I considered referencing was The Sneetches, which has a similarly appropriate moral.More options
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Maybe, but it's hard to tell. If I'm an employer I have reasons for not wanting employees to tell nigger jokes at work or request blowjobs from female staff regardless of the liability situation, and as a matter of public policy we don't want employers to encourage the above as an end-around to avoid anti discrimination laws. The law involves tradeoffs, and most people's desire to bring politics into non-political jobs, or hear about other people's politics, is outweighed by the desire to prevent real discrimination. Talking about the apparatus of oppression only makes sense in this instance if you're talking about the employer's interest, because there's no free speech guarantee when you're on somebody else's time.
I think the point is that a small and unpopular ideology has hijacked large swathes of the administrative organs of power, abused them, and is increasingly doing harm to society.
Now people who are otherwise principled are abandoning those, and those who aren't are considering doing worse things.
If the majority of people feel the use of something that should be common sense and stabilizing is abuse then it doesn't matter what the point was. It's abuse.
The threat of of this HR stuff is used to oppress me and others, and from what I can tell often the things we might otherwise say are fine or acceptable (and sometimes not) but you can't assess that safely because of the chilling effect.
Misuse of these tools and perceived misuse generated by other abuses is tearing society apart.
Sorry I'm going in circles here.
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These were definitely strong motivators for me in voting for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. I probably would've abstained - not because I disliked both candidates, but because I believe that the likelihood of the future changing due to my vote is so infinitesimally small that I don't see it as worth it (and the state in which I lived only made that even less likely) - but given how much the Blue Tribe sees insufficient applause as disapproval, I didn't want to take the risk of being in a situation where I'd have to lie that I voted for Biden or Harris. Which made the decision to vote and whom to vote for really really easy.
I think people who live in Red areas and Blue area Blues do not realize how oppressed a lot of America feels.
Are we really? Maybe not, but the feeling is there.
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"Our Indian developers are the cause of 95% or more of the issues we face (in terms of delivery speed of new features, software performance, and software stability). We could fire virtually all of the 200+ Indians we have writing terrible code and replace them with half a dozen American developers for roughly the same price (if not cheaper)."
I'd like to repeat that for female software devs. They're fine in
DevOpsEdit: Activities that are neither coding nor DevOps, and there are a golden few who actually can code, but there's also a surprising amount who, no matter how often it fails, insist on just copying whatever ChatGPT gives them.I've never see a female DevOps engineer (if by DevOps we mean a person that sets up software stacks, CI/CD pipelines and is responsible for the smooth running of software in general as opposed to implementing business-facing features). QA? Lots of 'em.
No, in this case I didn't mean Hackerman who sleeps in the server room and has admin rights on the entire company's software ecosystem.
Rather, Sybil and Jennifer who are responsible for incident handling, test schedule deconflicting and update management for a limited vertical and horizontal section of the stack.
Sybil and Dschennifer sound like they work in second-line support or QA to me.
Well, fine, it's not DevOps then.
Tbh, I hate the idea of there being "a DevOps". The whole idea was to erase the divide between development and operations, but instead we ended up with a third role between them.
Every decade or so some dude gets tired of coding, and comes up with a new retarded paradigm that amounts to putting the same shit in a different package, but he can now go around big corpos selling workshops.
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It's a matter of standing law that the Civil Rights Act controls what public radio stations that employees may turn on. Google defended -- and the NLRB accepted -- that anti-discrimination law actively required that the company police the speech of its employees. Other cases have held that employers are responsible for even off-premises and after-hours speech by their employees, or where the speech was not even directed from one employee to another.
In some cases, this is plausible as a defense. Several early hostile work environment cases revolved around 'employees' who were already fired by their employer, with the lawsuit between plaintiff and employer revolving around whether the employer should have acted sooner.
In other cases, it's hard to even separate matters; there's now a strong convention against nudie mags in even the bluest-collar of blue collar jobs, and of course no employer wants their workers to be staring at breasts while on the job today. Would that have been considered as unacceptable without thirty years of HR hammering into every employer and employee?
But in most, it's not especially defensible. We just had a big court case about an employer making fun of an employee for being gay (and fat); the only reason the employer won (after a long and uncertain court case) was because everyone agreed this job was ministerial, not Because Free Speech Uber Allies. And the employer very clearly did not want to apply the anti-'hostile work environment' policy, given that they probably spent tens or thousands of dollars defending their not complying with it. There are hundreds of cases like this, almost all of them get no legal defense, and that's before getting to the wide variety that no one defies even when they want to because they know they're fucked.
And then you think for ten seconds, and you remember that people put a ton of political capital into not only maintaining but expanding (Bostock! Kinda a big deal!) these policies, and it becomes kinda obvious.
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I am not claiming that my employer and most potential employers would not discriminate against me; I am saying that I am in favor of the sorts of laws they have used to coordinate such discrimination should be used to coordinate discrimination against my enemies as well, and that I am entirely comfortable with the federal government forcing them to do so regardless of their personal wishes.
I am pointing out that we have been abridging free speech through the power of federal law for more than thirty years, and the core purpose and justification of these abridgements absolutely applies here. I understand that to a first approximation, no one ever actually meant all that horseshit about fair, meta-level principled opposition to discrimination against the Other; it is enough to make that fact abundantly clear.
To the extent that there was ever a justification for legal restrictions against "hate" and "prejudice" and "bigotry", it applies here. To the extent that it does not apply here, every instance of acceptance and cooperation with these laws for the last fifty fucking years has been a swindle.
You can talk about edge cases all you want, but there's a Chesterton's Fence element here too. Hostile work environment doctrine was introduced to prevent employers from evading discrimination laws by, say, hiring black people but making fun of them for their race at work so that blacks simply wouldn't want to work there. "You can work here, but it will be hell" doesn't exactly advance the aims of the Civil Rights Act. You can argue that in some instances courts have gone too far, but you can do that with respect to any doctrine. When discussing tradeoffs, guys being able to look at porn at work isn't going to win against making it difficult for women to be employed there.
Notably this is how conservatives were forced out of academia.
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I am not arguing that people should be able to watch porn at work, or that people should be able to use racial slurs. I am saying that some approximation of the respect people like me have been required by federal law to extend to those different from us must now be reciprocated toward us, that this reciprocation being enforced by the same federal law is perfectly acceptable to me, and that those who object at this have no leg to stand on.
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Neither does the judiciary gutting the black-letter law of the CRA to decide that harassment is a one-way street and protected classes are not general categories.
The Supreme Court just ruled unanimously that the CRA is not a one-way street, and the same standards apply regardless of whether the plaintiff is a member of a minority group.
Yeah, I recall the case, still waiting to see if it has real impact or gets worked around by some other loophole or discretion.
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It only took them sixty years and four chief justices to reach the correct answer.
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Is there a difference between this style of "tradeoff" and "that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future"?
I'm not sure what you are referring to.
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Ah, but telling white people that they are harmful or evil or oppressors due to their race is A-OK? Because that's the order of the day at some employers (including the well-documented case of Google) who dismiss for "hostile workplace" directed against their favored groups.
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Ask Jim Damore.
(And mods, before you ding me for low effort, consider what Rov_Scam is actually doing here. First, expressing a Dory-like disingenuous ignorance of, well, the whole culture war. Second, insinuating that obviously anything one might want to say that would trigger "hostile environment law" is something which is obviously unreasonable to say. And further, gloating that of course any employer would restrict such stuff without the government's help, perhaps because said employers are run by the left anyway. But without spelling it out, so there's no handle with which to dispute it)
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