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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.
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.
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