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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.
Since this was decision by arbitration over violation of a union CBA, the question of whether saying something stupid and offensive qualifies as "gross misconduct" seems to depend on how their contract was written, not whether the average person thinks dancing in the blood of a murdered man is gross and unprofessional.
While we can all fill in the obvious shoe-on-the-other-foot hypotheticals, I would like to know if there are any comparable cases where a Post writer was fired for "gross misconduct" for social media posts.
This appears to be an appeal to formal rule-based systems. I'm comfortable arguing that neither this system nor any system like it has ever or will ever protect people like me in a situation like this one. If I'm correct in that argument, people like me have no interest in accepting the output of this system, nor in maintaining or preserving systems of this sort generally.
That being said, you're looking for context, and that's a reasonable thing to do in my view. Even if a system is biased, there's still something to be said for consistency over time, even intratribal.
I seem to recall some cases where unions refused to defend workers accused of racism, but I can't find them now and I'm pretty sure they were teacher's unions. I did find this case where an AFL-CIO affiliated union did successfully defend a white worker accused of doing a racism against a black person.
There is a vast difference between AFL unions and teachers unions. It could have also been an SEIU Union, which is even more aggressively left wing.
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"So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
"Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
"Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
"Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
This is why one of the things people were saying in January 2025 is "the laws are flat". The formal systems had ALREADY been knocked down in order to cancel (and in some cases imprison) right-wing people. So the thing to do is make like the Devil and turn 'round on them.
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A moving performance and a powerful clip. But if the laws instead lie flat as a crop-circle for one's enemies but tall and thick to protect one's friends you just have anarchotyranny.
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Why depend on the law for your own safety's sake? Why not cut down every law in England to get after the Devil, and then if he turns round on you, just prop them back up again to hide behind? What, specifically, keeps them down?
This is a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.
[EDIT] Let me make the point more explicitly. You are making the argument to me that if one disregards the laws, then the laws will not be there to help one when they are needed. My argument is that my opponents have disregarded the laws, and so should not be able to appeal to them. If I am right that they have disregarded the laws, but you insist I should still give them benefit of them, then I ought likewise to be able to disregard the law and still receive the benefit of them, so disregarding their appeal to the laws is the correct position to take. If your argument is that once disregarded, the laws cannot be appealed to, then my opponents' previous disregard means I should reject their appeals now, and disregarding their appeal to the laws is likewise the correct position to take.
If your argument is that they should be able to disregard the law an unlimited amount of times and yet still appeal to the law, and if I reject such appeals I will be denied the benefit of the law in my hour of need, I will point out that this is a needlessly convoluted way of declaring oneself an enemy.
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Define people like you?
This was a union arbitration contract. Union arbitration contracts are notorious for protecting people that did verboten to liberals things(normally sexual harassment but racial comments definitely would be a thing there).
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Yes. I still care about these things. If you're right it won't matter.
If I'm right, it might not be too late to arrest the process or at least mitigate the damage, or in the final extremity to see it coming and bypass doom. But arresting the process would mean building some sort of durable norm, and I think you would agree this isn't that. If the idea was that we bury the idea of stochastic terrorism and group accountability for all imaginable consequences of hostility to the other and actually restored an iron law of free speech maximalism from this day forth, that would be one thing. But it seems to me that anyone who doesn't realize that this will wrench back the other way the moment the shoe is on the other foot is lying to themselves. This is a conversation we can have in advance, and it seems to me that we should have it in advance, if for no other reason that preparing to exploit that inevitable flip to the maximal extent possible is absolutely, obviously in my Tribe's interest, and any counter-argument to pursuing that interest zealously is never going to have a better chance of succeeding than it has right now.
What am I supposed to do about it? I do argue for free speech maximalism and fairness. It makes me as popular among my Blue tribe cohort as I am among the Reds here.
Staking out the moral high ground when that plot of land isn't in play is a cheap signal. I agree with you about the theoretical advantage of free speech maximalism. I also know that isn't an option in the current dispensation, or probably ever. If we're arguing black-box politics, you're absolutely right. If we're arguing real-world political coalitions in which one group has much more of a censorship apparatus than the other, and both are going ham with what they've got.....then free speech maximalism is just Lions fandom. The adulation of a losing team for the purpose of not having to pick between real contenders.
FWIW, I find myself working through a lot of my libertarian beliefs like this recently.
Speech maximalists fundamentally fail because it requires speech maximalism to be the ultimate good. If Che Guevara is winning but you have one final moment to stop his movement and hang him and essentially protect your shire almosts everyone is choosing to hang him. And the US government and people have chosen this route many times.
Sometimes you need to be anti-liberal to save liberalism.
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I think you're dead wrong about Lions fans, and by extension free speech maximalists. They aren't sticking with a losing thing because that's easier than choosing between possible contenders, they are sticking with the losing thing because they truly love it and are unwilling to abandon it no matter the cost. I think that this is noble and something more people should emulate, personally. The world is a shitshow these days precisely because so many people evaluate their principles based upon the results they get from them, rather than sticking to "sorry, but this is just plain right and I don't care if anyone else agrees".
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