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Notes -
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all. There were two posts cited to, allegedly because they disparaged white men on the basis of gender or race, but the arbitrator ruled that was not supportable by reference to the post themselves (Page 30, Section C The Record Does Not Establish That the Grievant Disparaged White Men). The posts themselves are:
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you. If people had sent threats to Google over Damore, would they have been more justified in firing him?
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union! If there wasn't a CBA I'm skeptical Attiah would have won a more general employment discrimination lawsuit from this set of facts.
Do you think this is a just outcome for this incident?
If you think this is a just outcome, are you comfortable with people generalizing the logic behind this outcome into a set of rules you will then accept living under?
If this is an example of what Unions can achieve, I am even less interested in allowing unions to continue existing than I was previously.
My predictions were logged long ago that I think violence is going to increase. When it does, I intend to quote this post and the context it references back to you, to the letter.
Your predictions have been logged long enough to have been proven wrong. Violence has decreased broadly since the pandemic. I imagine you'll point towards the two attempted Trump assassinations and Charlie Kirk, but I'm unconvinced this is out of the ordinary for a particularly controversial political figure.
Are you willing to make any actual falsifiable predictions on any kind of timeline? You all predicted riots and burning and political violence after the Roe V. Wade repeal, after the 2024 elections, after pretty much every red tribe victory. And just like your predictions about the coming 1,000 year Christian Nationalist Reich in the wake of the 2024 election, you've been categorically wrong. What is it you all like to say? The demand for political violence outstrips supply?
I first read you predicting catastrophic political violence and the disintegration of American society 6 years ago on reddit, and I'm still here in 2026 reading it after none of these things have come to pass.
I would also point to the popular reaction to the murder of Kirk and the attempts to murder Trump within Blue Tribe, and how these reactions compare to Blue Tribe's previous positions on how speech should be policed. I'll point to the endemic calls for the assassination of Musk, the organized vandalism and arson campaigns against Tesla dealerships and even (IIRC) individuals' personally-owned vehicles, and how major national politicians winked and nodded along rather than taking a stand against their mob. I'll point to Mangione's killing of the United Health CEO, and the obscene public reaction to the killing from grassroots Blues generally. I'll point to the continued Anti-ICE rioting and intimidation campaign, culminating in the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, and how the discourse rolled out of those two shootings. I'll point to the evident entrenched denial of basic civil rights in Blue strongholds in the Pacific Northwest, where organized gangs of thugs abuse disfavored religious and political minorities while the authorities pointedly refuse to intervene unless it is to protect those thugs from reprisal. I would point to the Kamloops graves scam and the subsequent rash of church arsons. I'd point to church invasions being pushed as a "protest" tactic, and the apparent reluctance to enforce black-letter federal law against such tactics. I'll point to the ascendence of the DSA types within the Democrat Party, and the complicity of their leaders and influencers in all of these problems and many more besides.
I'll also point out that the arguments made in an attempt to keep a lid on these things are deployed when convenient, but cannot be undeployed when desired. We're Wrenching, here: it was very important that we address "right wing extremism" when a campaign ad put a crosshair on a congressperson's district and then she was publicly shot, or when it was obviously necessary to purge Red Tribers from every major social media platform, and we debated those ideas here at length. Now it's very important that we remember that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, and the very idea of policing public expressions of murderous pseudo-ethnic hatred is beyond the pale because muh freeze peach. Maybe some people still take these arguments seriously; there's a sucker born every minute, after all. For those who have more memory than a goldfish, though, it seems to me that the ability of these arguments to moderate conflict simply goes away and never comes back. Certainly it ought to.
I am not a plurality, and I'm pretty sure I didn't predict riots and political violence specifically after Roe V. Wade appeal, much less a 1,000 year Christian Reich. I have predicted that the violence is going to get worse, and it seems to me that it is getting worse. You can admit it or not, but there is now a faction inside the Overton window that is explicitly endorsing murder as a viable political tactic, not in some hypothetical, abstract future but specifically in reference to actual murders and attempted murders that have actually happened. You can, as some here do, pretend that this is not a serious problem, right up until it's your champions catching bullets. And when that happens, what will you say when Blues here discuss how grassroots political extremism and popular support for murder as a political solution is a problem, actually, and I reply exclusively with @magicalkittycat quotes?
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, but it appears to me that the trend is consistent, and as noted above, you appear to be ignoring a whole lot of the stuff you argue isn't happening. Conflict resolution mechanisms continue to degrade, conflict continues to escalate. Race relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, in ways that appear to me strongly resistant to the standard liberal arguments for comity and toleration. Tribal relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, again in ways that liberalism has no real answer for. The Democratic party is now entering its own political civil war between a corrupt relatively-centrist establishment and grassroots ideological extremists, which will be actualized in the upcoming elections and in the policy consequences of those elections. I do not think that this will result in an increased likelihood of peace and prosperity for all, but I'm ready to stand corrected.
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