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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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He can fire you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt, because he doesn't like that your voice sounds annoying, that he saw a picture of your lawn and thought it wasn't taken care of well.

He can't fire you for being pregnant, female, black, Muslim, gay, trans, or disabled, so I don't see why he can fire you for being a Republican, Communist, believer in race IQ differences, or a supporter of Palestinian independence. Especially if you do those things outside of work. Which is always the fear. It's never, I'm going to proselytize to my coworkers, it's always, what if my X account gets doxxed and all these comments I made on the internet outside of work get me fired. We could just make that illegal.

Protection from termination for political views varies by state, and- perhaps counterintuitively but unsurprisingly- it tends to be blue states which have strong protections for political views, theoretically to protect union organizing.

He can't fire you for being pregnant, female, black, Muslim, gay, trans, or disabled, so I don't see why he can fire you for being a Republican, Communist, believer in race IQ differences, or a supporter of Palestinian independence

Maybe they should be able to fire people for the former things as well. Overly irrational amounts of bigotry are eventually solved by free markets. If you pass up too many good candidates just for them being gay or black or Republican or communist, you're going to do worse business wise. And there will be smarter businesses and competition that don't care about those things and just want to win in the market. It's not that irrational amounts of bigotry don't happen at all, but that they aren't really as meaningful.

Anti discrimination laws don't really have much of an impact, since in a democracy for them to be passed it requires a population that is already rather anti discrimination! So they're gonna be mostly not doing too much irrational discrimination on their own. At least, not those outside of what society already generally wants.

it's always, what if my X account gets doxxed and all these comments I made on the internet outside of work get me fired. We could just make that illegal.

Make what illegal here? The doxxing or the firing? Doxxing being illegal doesn't really make sense, it's historically considered a form of free speech and free press. Journalists would try to reveal anonymous people all the time in the past.

Overly irrational amounts of bigotry are eventually solved by free markets.

Only if there's enough competition. Which in most sectors, there isn't. You know, because, there's only so many people.

Anti discrimination laws don't really have much of an impact, since in a democracy for them to be passed it requires a population that is already rather anti discrimination!

Their impact is bounded, but not necessarily 0. 60% of people can easily force 40% of people into behaving differently in a Democracy. Which is roughly what happened with Civil Rights.

Make what illegal here? The doxxing or the firing? Doxxing being illegal doesn't really make sense, it's historically considered a form of free speech and free press.

Firing. That would be the extension of civil rights. Although you could make doxxing illegal too. The precedence for this in the United States would mostly be 18 U.S.C. ยง 1030. Weev went to federal prison for publishing a list of emails he got from a public HTTP API, because AT&T did not intend for the API to be public. Doxxing works on the same principal; it's the publication of information that was not intended to be public. The onus is not on the doxxee to secure the information 100% properly, because Congress has already rejected pure internet anarchy. If the information is reasonably interpreted to be intended-as-private, access and publication could be said to constitute exceeding authorized access. I just read a doxx on Howling Mutant in fact which used two data breach leaks as proof! That could obviously constitute felony usage of felony-produced data, just like using leaked passwords to break into an account. Morally, doxxing is obviously a crime which has a victim, which the criminal intends to harm, which makes it much more of a crime than probably the majority of so-called computer crimes the United States prosecutes.