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This Hateful Fool Shouldn’t Lose His Job
In a surprising twist on the usual social media pile-ons, a left-wing Alabama man has just lost his job after posting mean comments about the victims of the Sevier County, Tennessee fires on Facebook. Bringing to mind the Left-wing social-media-fueled persecutions of Justine Sacco and Brendan Eich, this case is one where the Right has done the pile-on, and the man has apparently lost his job.
Perhaps it’s easier for me to make my point when I might be expected to be on the other side of this, and I can stand up for principle without people thinking that I have an interest in this man’s case.
I want to make a stand for the right of any fool to say stupid, cruel things and not be in danger of an online mob of villagers with virtual pitchforks and torches spreading his name around and pushing his employer to fire him. Surely we can agree on that. Right, America?
Published in Culture
He’s a SJW, he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. Don’t forgive someone that doesn’t believe they did something bad. You aren’t teaching them anything.
Keep firing.
If you talk like an enemy propagandist, don’t be surprised if people start looking at you like you are one OP.
What a miserable time it must be to be an employer. You’ve got to find people who are qualified or can be taught to do the actual job, and hope that they will actually come to work. The government says you are responsible for providing health insurance for your employees and tells you what must be covered in the policy, as well as giving you a thousand regulations on how to pay them and treat them. You’ve got to be worried if one of your employees flirts with another one.
Besides the government doing what it can to make your life miserable, now you also have to worry about any of your employees saying something offensive on Twitter or Facebook, because the public is going to make you pay for that. I’ve got no problem with people shunning the actual offenders. Don’t want to invite the neighborhood Facebook trash-talker to your neighborhood party? Great. Give him a dirty look when you run into him at the grocery store? Go for it. I just hate the idea of pressuring the idiot’s employer to be a nanny.
I was in the middle of replyimg to your original comment, when I had a meeting come up. A few of you have misunderstood my post. I’m not talking about this man’s employer. I’m talking about the response by people calling for him to be fired. The employer gets put into a tight spot, but it’s directly because of those mobs calling the company up and making trouble for him.
I am an East Tennesseean. These fires got two miles from my parents’ farm, and I have a personal revulsion against what this man said. But it’s none of my business to spread his name around Facebook or Twitter or call up his boss and make trouble.
THAT’S what has to stop. This is revenge, it is a sin, it is unchristian, and it is hateful. This is the unmaking of civil society, and to hell with it.
And while we’re at it, boycotts are just as bad.
My comparison to Brendan Eich wasn’t in regards to what he did—obviously, he kept his opinions to himself as far as he could—but to what the mob did when they found out.
They put pressure on his company to fire him, just like this man’s. It is just as wrong to do it to someone like Eich as it is to do it to this fool. Revenge is never right between people.
I challenge anyone to tell me the golden rule is the wrong advice here.
Do unto others as they would do unto you….
New York addendum- “before they do it unto you…”
Sounds like have the little SOB canned to me.
If I made comments about tragic victims like that, I would fire myself.
I’m a college professor, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this decade it’s that if I make one comment someone can possibly take offense at (and there’s a whole school of lunatic—but widespread—thought that says that offense must be treated subjectively), my tenure, meant to protect me from this sort of situation, will be meaningless. Society, especially with the influence of social media, is devolving into intolerant, unAmerican mob action.
We cannot behave just as awfully as the permanently outraged Left does. If our principles mean anything to us (I wonder sometimes), they have to mean that we STOP the mob rather than joining in, or even shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Well, I didn’t like that guy, anyway.”
He chose the path of pain rather than kindness. If you can’t adapt to someone that takes advantage of you because you won’t react to someone that did not return your kindness with their kindness, then you only will bring pain to those you love as they trample all over you and yours.
He willingly said that he didn’t empathize, so do the same to him.
This is not convincing me. It’s revenge, and it’s wrong.
That’s precisely the opposite of what Jesus has told us to do. Are you suggesting I disobey one of his clearest commandments?
Your challenge was not to convince you. I responded to your challenge as worded.
Our society and culture places no cost on publicly saying abhorrent things.
Fifty years ago, this guy would have taken a punch or two, or at least be told to shut up and get lost.
Now we allow him to define deviancy down, to borrow a well turned phrase.
Then spell it out. You’ve moved from the golden rule to something else.
On the one hand I agree with you. The Twitter and Facebook stuff is ridiculous. If you don’t solicit the business, any sort of call for his firing is pure revenge, which is bad for exactly the reasons you say.
But if I saw that and recognised him (in a small town, say) as the guy who changed my oil, I’m perfectly justified in calling his employer to say I don’t want that man touching my car (let’s say I have a trump sticker… does a bolt not get tightened properly? Wrong kind of oil? Hose severed?). If I’m his employer, I’ve probably been wanting to fire a guy like that for some time, and this is the last straw.
But yes. Strangers on social media? Get a better hobby.
I hear you.
But going back to my first comment, I think this defies any left/right labeling. If I understand you, you are saying that in this case the Right is behaving like the Left.
Do you think it’s only people on the right who voted for Trump who took offense and gathered their pitchforks?
It’s horrible behavior and I condemn it regardless of who is doing it.
I think it would be more effective to condemn the behavior and eschew any left/right labels. I think we’re in a whole new world and the old labels don’t apply anymore
Well, no. The golden rule is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which is quite the opposite of “do unto others as they would do (or have done) unto you.” That’s sort of the whole message…
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
In this case: I want others to avoid making a mob and spreading my name around social media and pressuring my employer to fire me, when I say something they don’t like. Therefore, I should likewise refrain from joining a mob and spreading this man’s name around social media and pressuring his employer to fire him, even though he said something I don’t like.
And anyone who calls himself a Christian (and from Hillel’s formulation, I believe this goes for Jews, too) should do likewise.
Am I incorrect?
And that’s mostly what I’m talking about. Because this got spread around the internet, I suspect this was mostly strangers who didn’t live there or use his company anyway. If I lived there, I might not want him working on my car, as you said (or who knows—I know some people who are nice in person but get crazy online), although I wouldn’t push a boycott.
And I’ll reiterate your last line: for strangers on the internet, get a better hobby.
That is as I recall, the golden rule without the platinum rule backing it up.
I perceive joining any group with no basis in truth as joining in Legion, in my moral sensibilities.
However if you do not share critical information with concerned parties I am harming them. Also you have to verify that information so you aren’t bearing false witness.
On the Eich front, why haven’t you been plugging Brave?
He chose his path and I choose my path. I won’t let him choose my path.
My path would be to not go to work to have him fired, but to object loudly to his behavior and ridicule the left for its hypocrisy.
Mostly agree. I don’t see why you should feel compelled to take a side of this issue for firing the guy. For the vast majority of things I don’t believe people should be fired from their jobs for unrelated outside issues. As long as people do their jobs, then I don’t believe in the standard of employers pushing cultural or opinion orthodoxy on employees. There could be some few exceptions to this for certain specialty jobs; like for instance being a raging anti-semite and working at a holocaust museums saying “they had it coming” or something along these lines where the outside views directly affect performance or adversely affects the bottom line of the company in some obvious and public way.
Re: The First Amendment, it does not mean that you can say anything you want with no consequence, merely that Comgress shall make no law prohibiting you from speaking. It also applies to everyone, meaning that if his employer does not wish to subsidize his speech or other after-hours activities in the form of continued employment, they are under no obligation to do so.
Re: Not holding employers responsible for off-duty thoughts of their employees, are you sure you really wouldn’t or shouldn’t do that?
If an accountant posts on facebook “I love taking my client’s money and buying crack cocaine with it”, should that person still be employed by their firm? Would you do business with that firm?
If an elementary school teacher posts on facebook “I want to have sex with five year olds,” should that person still have a job in education? Even if they never actually had sex with a five year old? Would you keep your children in that school if the school did not immediately fire this person?
If a police officer says on facebook “You know, black people really are inferior, based upon what what I see at work every day,” Should that police officer still be employed? Even if they had no prior complaints against them?
I agree that firing for Facebook comments should generally not be grounds for firing unless (a) that person is the public face of the company or otherwise in a position where his comments might be associated with the company or (b) it substantively affected his ability to do his job or interact with other employees.
I think in this case, it was customers who brought the comments to the attention of management which almost puts it within exception (a) above.
More rational solution is to request that he post a retraction/apology/clarification in the same space and have that available in case other customers complain. If it results in material harm to the firm, then he’s out.
I would like a company I frequent to not employ someone who wishes me dead.
Your otherwise noble attempts to be charitable miss this rather important distinction. This isn’t just another expression of an unpopular opinion, this is actual malice. He is celebrating the deaths of innocents. If that’s not fireable what is?
I see your point. I respectfully disagree. Boycott’s and situations like this one are very important. If we are to be a civilized society, that society must be built on holding each other accountable to common norms and respect for one another. Neither of the examples you shared of leftist snow-flakes attacking, show someone with bad motives being justly singled out by aggrieved people. Just blind virtue signaling by fools whose very existence depends on being in a constant state of grievance. This fellow is exhibiting and filled with a degree of hate and anger that should be called out and punished. Companies that choose to attack the beliefs of the market they are in should pay a price.
The left has been using these methods to intimidate and destroy for decades and it is getting worse and more un-just. You are right in that we who believe in a just and righteous society must be sober in our use of such tactics lest we become like the adversary but we must fight nonetheless.
Do we know whether the employer saw this man as an extremely valuable employee but felt pressured to fire him because he faced an economic boycott? That was the Eich situation. My speculation is that the man had tendencies that made him both a so-so worker at best and that customer outrage simply shifted the cost/benefit calculation of finding and training a replacement.
@TimH has focused on the christian approach to someone who says vile things. That’s not a political discussion. The political discussion involves an organized effort to deprive someone of a livelihood — employer or employee — whose political content in speech does not accord with one’s own views. It assumes facts not in evidence that the employer would not have preferred having a different employee but for the costs of recruiting and retraining a replacement even if the guy hadn’t been a jerk on FB.
Tim
Same feeling on Pistachio girl? http://deadspin.com/phillies-pistachio-girl-fired-for-being-a-white-natio-1789696359
Actually, I agree with you here. I brought this case up specifically, though, because it’s one where there is no risk of my being accused of being personally sympathetic to this man or what he believes. In the cases of Sacco, Matt Taylor (the comet landing guy attacked for his shirt), and Eich, for a conservative or an apolitical type to say anything online in their defense was to risk being attacked by the same mob accusing you of being a racist, sexist, or homophobe and ruining you in the same way.
So I brought this one up because given where I’m from and what my political views are, I might be expected to be in the mob myself. I can stand up against the mob action and condemn it and make it very clear that it’s not because I’m defending “my side.”
There’s all kinds of people out there who wish you dead. Many of them are employed at places you frequent. At least in this individuals case, you know it.
As far as the political makeup of the mob, I’m assuming it’s largely of the Right, given that his disdain towards East Tennesseeans is based on the fact we largely voted for Trump. But yes, there could be Leftists and apolitical types who are in this mob as well.
If you reread my original post, I hope you’ll see that I didn’t make a big deal out of the political makeup of the mob and only mentioned once that this is (as I believe) coming from the Right. The rest of the post is without regards to whose side it is, except that people might expect me to be joining in, which makes it easier to stand up against it.