Content warning: Misogynistic online harassment, including rape threats.
I want to respond to a comment left by Desipis, but to do that, I’ll need to bring in some context.
Clementine Ford is a feminist columnist from Australia. Various misogynists have contacted her to say abusive things, and – if the person contacting her hasn’t covered up their identity – she publicly outs them. For instance, this summer, Ford outed a man who emailed her “I’m going to bash and rape you stupid little sl**. Lesbian scum.” The man apologized, and (ironically) was subjected to strangers sending him horrible messages and threats (which I don’t approve of). Around the same time, three high school boys were suspended after Ford reposted misogynistic and racist messages they’d left on her Facebook page.
According to Ford, “It’s not unusual for me to field abuse like this, although it tends to be more of a constant drip than a deluge.” But this week, it’s a deluge. Because Michael Nolan got fired.
A bit more context. On Ford’s Facebook page, Ford posted a screenshot of someone telling her “You would jibber heaps less with a cock in your mouth.” Michael Nolan left a single-word response to this on Ford’s Facebook page: “Slut.”
In a follow-up post, Ford posted a screenshot of Nolan’s “slut” comment, along with screenshots of him reposting or agreeing with a couple of racist jokes. She linked her post to the Facebook page of Nolan’s employer, Meriton Apartments – meaning that whoever runs Meriton’s facebook page would be notified about her post. Ford wrote:
This was a comment left on the thread of a screenshot of a man publicly saying I would jibber less with a cock in my mouth. Calling me ‘slut’ in response to that is baffling, unless this man genuinely believes that women who speak out against abuse need to be taken down. Why should I put up with that?
There are basically no consequences for men who behave like this, so we have to start making consequences for them.
Five days later, Meriton contacted Ford to let her know they’d fired Norton. Ford wrote:
To anyone who suggests I have caused a man to lose his job, I’d like to say this: No. He is responsible for his actions. He is responsible for the things he writes and the attitudes he holds. It is not my responsibility to hold his hand and coddle him when he behaves in an abusive manner just because it might have consequences for him. Women are often told to stay silent about harassment because it’s not fair to ‘ruin a man’s career’. Why is their behaviour our responsibility? Enough. If you enjoy exercising misogyny online, you only have yourself to blame if the people with power over your life – your bosses, friends, family etc – decide that they don’t want to be associated with you anymore. The targets of your abuse are in no way, shape or form responsible for making sure your actions have no recriminations for you.
In the open thread, referring to how employers can be a threat to free speech, Desipis commented:
On that topic, Clemintine Ford has demonstrated again how many people thing being for social justice is about being as big an arsehole as you can be.
To those that argue freedom of speech isn’t about being protected against consequences, I’ll say it’s not about that, it’s about disproportionate responses.
That guy that takes a swing at you for looking at his girlfriend the “wrong way”? Arsehole.
The woman that calls the cops on a man in the park with a camera, or for being black? Arsehole.
Pushing for someone to be fired because they said a nasty word online? Arsehole.
So, a few thoughts:
1) I want to get to the free speech question, but I can’t not comment on Desipis’ jaw-dropping false equivalency between someone being irrationally harassed for being black, or being assaulted for looking at someone, versus someone being fired because of their own bad behavior. Maybe Michael Nolan shouldn’t have been fired, but he’s certainly not blameless here.
2) It’s good to get the idea of “disproportionate responses” into this discussion.
3) I can’t judge Michael Nolan as an entire person, because I have no idea. Maybe calling someone a slut and sharing two racist jokes is the worst thing that Nolan has ever done. (Who among us has never said or shared anything regrettable online?) Or maybe he’s consistently a hostile, abusive racist misogynist, and his bosses were already on the verge of firing him. Maybe the firing was completely fair. We just don’t know.
4) But if the firing was unfair, then blame should mainly lie with Michael Nolan’s former boss, not Clementine Ford.
5) If we’re going to be casting judgements on Clementine Ford – and that’s where Desipis and many others are taking this – then let’s acknowledge that Ford wasn’t just responding to Michael Nolan’s comment. She’s responding to a seemingly never-ending stream of misogynistic abuse. (For lots of examples, check out the repulsive comments Ford’s received since Nolan’s firing.)
If I think of it as just this one incident, then yes, responding to an online insult by reporting it to Nolan’s employer is disproportionate. But if I think of it as an ongoing problem – people (mostly men) are persistently sending her online abuse because they have no incentive to stop – then Ford’s policy of outing her harassers, when she can, seems like the only tool she has for creating a disincentive for harassers.
In the comments of the Open Thread, Grace asked Desipis a very telling question:
Out of curiosity, what would you rather Ford had done, other than ignore it? She has already tried to use Facebook’s feedback mechanism to address comments far worse than that. Facebook user “Mathew Harris” wrote, “Clementine you are the most annoying feminist slut to have ever walked the earth. Please sit on a butchers [sic] knife so that you may never be able to reproduce.” Facebook’s response: “We reviewed the comment you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”
Is Ford supposed to meekly accept being a punching bag for misogynistic comments for the rest of her life? Why expect women, in the face of nonstop abuse, to act like saints, putting their abusers’ well-being before their own? Why would Ford owe Nolan and all her other abusers that level of consideration?
Michael Nolan is literally someone who saw a stranger complaining about misogynistic harassment, and his response was to call her a “slut.” Even if contacting someone’s boss is disproportionate – and I think it is – the root problem here is Nolan’s behavior, not Ford’s.
Now, about free speech….
6) Obviously, if we define “free speech” narrowly as only about government actions, then there’s no free speech issue here. But that’s not how I define it, and I see two free speech issues here.
First, it’s a problem when employers punish employees for what they say in their off-hours. It’s an incredibly bad idea for employers to act as speech police. Being fired for saying something offensive is, in most jobs,1 a disproportionate response. And it’s one that has the potential to chill the speech of anyone who can’t afford to lose their job.
There’s already too much of this sort of thing going on. Anything that normalizes the belief that employers should punish the off-work speech of their employers is harmful – not just to Michael Nolan, but to the free speech of everyone with a boss.
7) Second, online harassment is a huge free speech issue. Constant online abuse shuts people up – and that’s the goal of the harassers. Misogynistic harassment shuts women up – and that’s the goal of the harassers.
I personally know multiple women who avoid discussing controversies online – even controversies that they feel passionately about and have a lot to say about – not because they’re afraid of reasoned disagreement, but because they’ve seen the over-the-top abuse heaped on Clementine Ford, and Anita Sarkeesian, and Zoe Quinn, and Irene Gallo, and Brianna Wu, and Adria Richards, and Kathy Sierra, and so many more, and they’ve made the perfectly rational choice not to take that risk.
Clementine Ford appears to have skin thick as a bank vault, and says she won’t be deterred from speaking. Good for her! But being as resilient as Ford shouldn’t be a requirement for discussing controversial issues online. Free speech only for those with a Ford-like ability to withstand tons of abuse, isn’t free speech.
- I can think of some exceptions – for example, a politician’s campaign manager. But in general. [↩]
Okay:
1) I don’t believe people should be fired for normal political speech outside of work, or generally having or opinions or believing things that go against scientific consensus, or that same sex relationships are a sin. Obviously there are always exceptions to such things, but that’s another matter. I support laws that would protect employees from being fired in general for speech made off-line.
2) I don’t see insulting people online, or posting racist (or bigoted) jokes on social media, as being the kind of thing that should be a form of protected speech. Nor should employers be generally discouraged (legally or otherwise) from firing employees who engage in such speech/behavior.
Consider an example vagualy based on an incident that actually to me:
I eat at a restaurant regularly. One day, at another location, away from the restaurant, I overhear one of the restaurant employees whom I know engaging in a homophobic rant against the Boy Scouts now allowing gay members (this part is the kind of true part) and that they’re considering turning in their Eagle Scout award.
I haven’t been back to that restaurant since. As a result of this persons comments, this restaurant lost my business.
So… what if the hotel lost business because of this employees sexist and racist comments off-work, not because of an organized boycott, but because people who saw this employees behavior simply didn’t feel comfortable staying in a hotel where he was employed? If I was a woman who had been sexually harassed in the past, I certainly wouldn’t be running to make a reservation there.
Extreme hypothetical example for fun:
You are a business owner and you hire a manager to run things when you’re not around. You later find out that this person is a spokesperson a hate group during their off hours. They don’t engage in hate speech at work and have never said anything negative about any minority group while at work. But due to their work, they’re becoming fairly well known locally. Many of your friends and family tell you that they’ve stopped coming to your business because they don’t feel comfortable when he’s there. Looking at your business records, you can see a sharp decline in overall sales since you hired this person. If they trend continues, you’ll be out of business in a few months.
Do you fire them or let yourself go out of business?
Reputation is a fickle thing and repairing it when it’s been damaged isn’t easy to do.
You are basically arguing that an employee, should be able to engage in behavior which both damages the hotels bottom line and which society has little reason to protect in of itself (since insulting people and being sexist and racist are ultimately damaging to society) and their employer should not be able to fire them for that behavior.
Generally, I think society is better off with people being able to express political opinions and not get fired for them. I think even if somehow an employees political opinion (expressed offsite) were to somehow negatively affect a business, I would argue that protecting free speech (through laws which prevent that employee from being fired by that business) would be worth the gains to free speech and ultimately society.
Protecting employees from being fired for bigoted behavior/statements doesn’t gain society anything, since such behavior/statements damage society. Not to mention, it kind of boils down to society protecting people for being bigots and engaging in assholish behavior.
-Jeremy
1) Those might not be the best analogies, and the “being black” example was a poor afterthought. However, some people do think that checking out someone else’s girlfriend or taking pictures of other people in a public place is “bad behaviour” so I don’t think they’re that far off the mark for making my proportionality point.
2&3) I agree.
4) I disagree.
Clementine Ford is an abrasive media personality (see the links below) with a significant media platform. Such a person asking a company if they’re “aware” of what the person did, is implicitly asking what they’re going to do about it, and carries the implicit threat that the media personality will use their platform to trash the companies brand should their response not deemed acceptable.
It’s the unavoidable external pressure placed on the company that makes this about power and bullying, and not about expressing an opinion.
5)
Ford puts herself out as a public figure with controversial opinions, as consequence of that is that many people will form opinions of her and of those, there will be some who form negative opinions. Those people are (or ought to be) entitled to publicly express their opinions, and express them in the language of their choice. She does have to accept that this is an inherent part of living in a free society.
That said, Ford is entitled to respond in kind, which she quite regularly does. It’s hypocritical of her to claim to be an innocent victim in all of this, and unreasonable for her to use that claim to justify escalating name calling to putting someone’s financial well-being at risk.
6) I agree.
7) I think there’s a real problem with the quasi monopoly that companies like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have over significant parts of public discourse. The attempt to create a one-size-fits-all standard for social conduct is inherently problematic. Either the standard will be so restrictive it prevents a lot of people from expressing themselves, or it will be so loose that it leaves people vulnerable to bullying and abuse.
The push shouldn’t be for the standard to be one thing or another; large companies like Facebook shouldn’t be responsible for policing social standards. The push should be for tools and technology for people to control their own experiences.
From my understanding, some sort of technological trust network would enable people to filter interactions to those with a desired level of trust, enabling engagement with a wider range of people than manually operated lists, but would avoid the problem of third parties making decisions that might otherwise prevent two willing individuals from engaging with each other. I’m sure there’s plenty of room for innovation to provide a much better solution than social authoritarianism or causing disproportionate real world harm in response to people’s words.
@Jeremy
The tricky thing about the examples you’ve outlined here is that they are both opinions/behaviors you disagree with. What if, instead of the person being the head of a hate group, they are the head of a local LGBT group or are very vocal about volunteering at the local Planned Parenthood. If they live in a particularly bigoted area, the business owner might see the same declines you described. Does this still give them cause to fire the employee?
It’s obvious why we don’t want companies, in general, to have zero-tolerance approaches toward social media. However, that doesn’t imply it’s opposite: an infinite-tolerance policy.
#####
So one of my coworkers is this semi-notorious neo-reactionary blogger/Twitter-person. Like, she on occasion gets a Valleywag article written about some horrible thing she has said, just really noxious stuff, such as that slavery was good for people or that software engineers are the anointed priesthood and clearly better than the “lesser people,” on and on, a constant stream of pretentious drivel. Given that we are a high profile company, this can be (to say the least) awkward.
She hasn’t been fired. So far as I know there has been no real pressure to fire her. I mean, sure, the average Valleywag comments section is full of silly back-and-forth on the topic, but that is all.
On the whole I’m glad. I find her politics awful, although it’s actually pretty hilarious to watch the ongoing dust-up over it. But still, it’s nice to see that my employer won’t fire people for standing out.
After all, I stand out.
But let us talk about what this terrible person does not do. She does not bully people. She’s not aggressively in anyone’s face. If you avoid her Twitter stream, and her blog, then you pretty much won’t hear from her, unless of course your friends are doing that angry-retweet-rage-storm shit. But that’s on them. If you read Valleywag, you get what Valleywag offers.
#####
I’m free to use social media as I choose. I can say controversial things, as can she. However, if I send hostile messages to people, if I attack, then I’m not sure if that still holds.
This Michael Nolan turd got in trouble because he went onto someone else’s Facebook-wall, a woman, and called her a “slut,” in response to her complaints about misogynistic bullying. In addition, his social media wall showed that he was a racist asshole, reposting crass, shallow humor. The latter is not enough to fire a person for. The former, however, is. Together these paint a picture of an aggressive asshole who hates women and has anger issues.
I’d fire him. In a heartbeat.
#####
Things are not symmetrical. The oppression of gays is not like the intolerance of racists, because racism is bad and being gay is not. Don’t forget that. We have to make civil society work, but that does not requires that we completely shut down all judgment. Some social conflicts are real. It’s okay for us to win.
After all, they’ve had decades to just stop being misogynists, homophobes, and racists. No sympathy from me.
Desipis:
So I followed the links you provided to Ford responding “in kind,” and I have to say that there is a big difference between calling someone a dickhead or a fuck face—neither of which, I grant you, represent civil discourse, but both of which are relatively generic insults—and telling someone they would “jibber less” with a cock in their mouth or wishing rape on someone or explicitly threatening to do either of those things. Do you not see a difference or do you think the difference doesn’t matter?
Also, it seems to me that asserting Ford has “to accept that this is an inherent part of living in a free society” is quite beside the point. As far as I can tell, she has not suggested that the misogynists who attack her don’t have the right to post what they want. She has, in the case of Michael Nolan, merely held him publicly accountable for what he has written. (Note: I am not saying that I think he should have been fired; as Amp writes, I don’t think we have enough information to say one way or the other.)
However, some people do think that checking out someone else’s girlfriend or taking pictures of other people in a public place is “bad behaviour” so I don’t think they’re that far off the mark for making my proportionality point.
In one case, the response to “checking out” someone’s girlfriend is violent criminality. In the other, the response to speech is exactly the response continually prescribed by free speech advocates: more speech. The disproportionality is far from obvious.
It’s the unavoidable external pressure placed on the company that makes this about power and bullying, and not about expressing an opinion.
The company could have told Ms Ford to buzz off. It could have told Mr Nolan to just stop linking to them from his FB page. It could have just ignored the whole issue.
I’m sure there’s plenty of room for innovation to provide a much better solution than social authoritarianism or causing disproportionate real world harm in response to people’s words.
Of course, we don’t have these hypothetical alternative response. I don’t see why, in their absence, targets of public, verbal abuse are obligated to remain silent instead of truthfully reporting that boorish assholes are, indeed, being boorish assholes.
I think Clementine Ford has written a lot of taunting, insulting crap that can easily be characterized as man-hating. She’s not on the radar screen of this board because the focus here seems to be on women-hating speech to the exclusion of man-hating speech.
So she gets some pushback. She dishes it out and then plays the victim. I’ve got more important things to do than to try to parse reasons why her blowback is supposedly worse than what she dishes out.
She knows that lots of employers are going to buckle if feminists or race-baiters put pressure on. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have gotten quite wealthy from that dynamic.
I wonder what people here would think about a kind of reverso world where negative comments about men are not tolerated at all. And then someone starts a huge mailing and e-mail campaign (that actually works in the reverso world) against Ampersand’s Patreon patrons because he allows what some perceive to be man-negative or man-hating comments here. I know lots of MRA-types do not like Ampersand at all.
Fair? Nasty?
My position: Both actions would be pretty nasty–but only one action to go after a commenter was actually taken. Clementine Ford is not only nasty, but a spoiled brat that can’t seem to take what she dishes out.
Wising:
Links, please, if you have them.
I think Clementine Ford has written a lot of taunting, insulting crap that can easily be characterized as man-hating.
I am unclear on the relevance of this alleged fact.
So she gets some pushback. She dishes it out and then plays the victim. I’ve got more important things to do than to try to parse reasons why her blowback is supposedly worse than what she dishes out.
And I have more important things to do than parse out why her particular form of speech is worse than Nolan’s. As best as I can tell at this point, it’s because it actually persuaded someone, which seems like a strange standard.
Either that, or it’s that she violated that First Rule of Fight Club, which seems like an even stranger standard.
I wonder what people here would think about a kind of reverso world where negative comments about men are not tolerated at all.
Yes, perhaps women perceived as making such negative comments about men would be inundated with misogynistic insults, with no small number of threats of rape and murder. It is difficult to imagine such an awful state of affairs.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
Well, here’s one for giggles, although I’m not going to spend any time on this:
“… although, who among us hasn’t had a daydream of going on a rampage and wiping out a third of the male population, AMIRITE?”
https://archive.is/uLM6S
Her “manterrupting” stuff is also great – just use the Google Machine – where she mocks men and points out how worthless they are.
I don’t even know if this board (with notable exceptions on it) would find ANYTHING to be man-hating, though. I assume that a man who joked about going on a rampage and killing a third of all women or who constantly derided women as pretty much worthless interrupters wouldn’t be chuckled about as much.
Anyway, if you are really curious and not just into obstructing what I am saying with LINK PLEASE, then the Google Machine will give you the answers you seek.
Wissig:
You’re right. Ford’s parenthetical remark, in an otherwise pretty thoughtful article, about fantasizing about wiping out a third of the male population is taunting—she, after all, had to know she would have male readers—and I will, for the sake of argument (though I don’t entirely agree), grant you that it’s insulting, though I don’t think I would go quite as far as man-hating. She is, after all, expressing an emotional response to men’s violence against women, not actually wishing that violence on men and certainly not any one man in particular. That is still quite different from the kinds of personal, misogynistic attacks she receives, in which men wish sexual violence on her, or threaten her with it, etc.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that everything she says is in good taste or that she is right in everything that she says or anything like that. I hadn’t heard of her until I read this thread, and so I don’t know enough about her. I am simply pointing out that there is a difference between the kinds of attacks she receives and what you and desipis have pointed out as “in kind” language from her. I think this difference matters when thinking about how and why she held Michael Nolan publicly accountable for his words. Do you?
In this case, however, the opinion was not merely expressed; it was expressed to her (online) face. Again, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a free speech right to say it, but it does raise the level of assholery.
Today, I read the Facebook comments on an article about the Chicago cop who shot McDonald posting bond posted by one of my friends.
The first comment was along the lines of “F***ing pig deserves to get shot himself.”
Mousing over her name, I saw that she worked in an Amazon warehouse. I’d imagine there are enough Amazon customers who would consider this worthy of a Twitterstorm if they ever found out. The post was not on the article, but on my friend’s share of the article, so not many people saw it.
Can we fire “jabber” guy and not her? Easily, if we put ourselves in the position of ranking who is deserving of protection from foul speech. Feminists, unless they are transphobic or if the speaker is a WOC Womanist and the target is white, are deserving of protection. Accused cops with solid evidence against them aren’t. So say we all! I’d certainly rather work with the anti-cop person than the anti-feminist guy as a customer or a coworker.
However, other people who you don’t agree with may have their own hierarchies and they can deluge employers with comments as well. Yet one group refusing to normalize these actions won’t prevent another from continuing. So war of all against all it is! Everybody loses!
Can we fire “jabber” guy and not her?
AFAICT, since I don’t make decisions about firing people for either Amazon or Meriton Apartments (who employed “slut” guy–“jabber” guy is someone else entirely), the answer to both questions appears to be no.
I’m not (just) being pedantic–the most I could do in either case is advocate that their respective employers should fire them. I don’t really understand why advocating that one of them be fired obligates you to actively make the case for another, and there are dozens of reasons why one might react differently to the two.
However, other people who you don’t agree with may have their own hierarchies and they can deluge employers with comments as well. Yet one group refusing to normalize these actions won’t prevent another from continuing. So war of all against all it is! Everybody loses!
This really doesn’t fill me with a palpable sense of loss. If there is a problem here, it seems to have more to do with inadequate protections for workers against being fired unfairly, rather than the fact that in rare instances an unfair firing might be precipitated by complaints about the employee’s public but off-the-job speech.
But aren’t we specifically talking about people getting fired by public but off-the-job speech?
If employers get to fire you for what you say online, should they be able to fire you for appearing at public events they disapprove of–say, a gay pride parade or Klan barbecue? Should they be able to regulate how you act and dress in public spaces for the sake of the corporate image? Perhaps they should also dictate that we remain home between the hours of 10PM and 6AM, never drink in public, and never ride in carriages with those of the opposite sex….
“If employers get to fire you for what you say online, should they be able to fire you for appearing at public events they disapprove of–say, a gay pride parade or Klan barbecue? Should they be able to regulate how you act and dress in public spaces for the sake of the corporate image?”
This is exactly the problem. We need to realize that the weapons we sharpen here will be used against us by people who will often have more of a majority behind them than we do with us. It would be much better for us to promote an ethos of tolerance where you can’t usually get fired from your job for political/moral/obnoxious beliefs.
It seems relevant to me that Nolan left the comment on Ford’s Facebook page. This is the online equivalent to saying something directly to someone’s face. And since, on his own Facebook page, one click away, he identifies his employer, this is rather like saying something directly to someone’s face while wearing the company’s T-shirt. Regardless of what action the employer took and whether or not it was reasonable, since that’s not under my control, people appear to be arguing that if someone walks up to me and calls me a slut while wearing the corporate T-shirt, it is not permissible for me to say to his employer, “Hey, FYI, your employee was wearing your shirt in public when he walked up to me and called me a slut, and just so you know, I found it offensive.” Is that what people are arguing?
Grace
Any support for a mass shooting, even ostensibly in jest, justifies firing. In the U.S., where mass shootings are so common, I’d even say that, in some cases, such statements might require firing, as they can create a hostile work environment.
Any employer should be able to fire employees who have made threats of violence , even implicit threats of the “someone should…”, “you deserve to be…”, or “wouldn’t it be wonderful if…” variety. “Just joking” is not a defence. If anyone (yes, of any sex/gender) is known to have made rape threats on line, anyone in the threatened class has good reason to fear working with that person.
I’m hardly a lawyer, let alone an expert in employment law, but my understanding is that most employees in most of the country could be fired for any of those reasons. We already live in a world where employment is precarious for many, many people. There’s a whole damn forest of ways that this status quo can constrain unpleasantly peoples’ lives, and this particular focus on how it might have a chilling effect on public speech strikes me as misaimed. People get fired for reasons that are way less fair than, “Someone truthfully pointed out that they acted in a conspicuously assholish way in public,” all the time.
On the other hand, there are many other social consequences should one gain notoriety for a high-profile bit of boorish behavior beyond negative consequences for one’s employment. One could alienate family and friends, or one’s faith community, or one’s neighbors. Are those consequences irrelevant? Why or why not?
Veronica: Thanks for your post! I thought that was a really good example, and it draws the line about where I’m comfortable drawing the line most of the time. I’m not sure it applies to all jobs, but it certainly applies to things like computer programmers and most office workers who don’t have direct power over others.
Also, I’m sorry you have to deal with a neo-reactionary. They’re the worst :(
yrs–
–Ben
@Ben — She actually works in a different office, so it doesn’t really affect me. (We’re a big company.)
That said, there have been a few fairly odious NRx bloggers who claimed to work here, who were anonymous, so I worry about those people. Like, is it the guy sitting next to me?
Blah! Probably not, but who knows.
But yeah, I’m not sure what kind of promotion path this person ought to have. I would hesitate to give her power over others. Likewise, I wouldn’t want to give a public impression that she is a “high profile” employee, tasked with setting strategy and direction — mostly since she’s publicly stated that our CEO should be appointed dictator of the United States. (I’m not kidding.) That is the kind of outrageous nonsense that no company wants as its public face.
I’m okay with truly odious people destroying their own reputation. People try to draw symmetries between this and (for example) hating gays. Which, I get it. But it doesn’t work as an argument. Hating gays is wrong according to its own virtue. Rejecting misogynists is the right thing to do, again according to its own virtue. Not everything is meta.
“But if misogynists get fired then it’s okay to fire gays,” is wrong, because it’s not okay to fire gays. Being gay and being a misogynist are different.
(Plus, to be honest, it’s a little late for the haters and bigots to discover the value of pluralism.)
My point is, we’re allowed to win the culture war. We should be happy when we do.
I’m pretty sure I’m on your side of the culture war, but there’s something menacing about that statement that doesn’t sit well and I can’t put my finger on it.
(tweaking my e-mail address trying to get my old pink-bow gravatar back)
On the one hand, yes, we’re allowed to win the culture war, and I think it’s great that outright misogyny and outright homophobia are unacceptable, and that we’re getting there with outright racism and outright transphobia.
On the other hand, we (not necessarily the same “we,” but I belong to both groups) are a group of people who value freedom of expression for its own sake, and don’t particular care if the boot on someone’s neck comes from a corporate, state, or federal source. And I feel like that’s a particular fight we’re losing right now, as the left seems to have wholly capitulated to libertarian “it’s only a problem if censorship and chilling effects are federal-level” argument.
“We will get you fired for saying this” is a pretty fucking huge chilling effect. Being fired sucks a lot. And it sucks much worse for poor people and chronically ill people than for middle-class and healthy people. For some people, it is literally a death sentence.
Basically, I’m going to hand-wring this shit to death.
yrs–
–Ben
The false equivalency here is stunning. One group peacefully advocates for their own rights. The other uses violence to deny rights to others.
Belonging to a group that advocates and/or commits violence to achieve its ends, or has a proven history of doing so is, to my mind, a fireable offence. There is an implicit threat that the person could act on their beliefs at any time. If, for example, the local gay pride group was advocating shooting officials who refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, then association with that group would be a fireable offense.
But like, I don’t really care if an occasional douchebag gets fired for his douchebaggery. It’s just so rare, and it seems unlikely that this will really change.
Which is to say, mainstream male-white-cis-NT-dominant culture will throw us a few bones like this, for the most egregious examples of shitty behavior, but all the same, actually getting someone fired for manifest sexual assault remains nearly impossible (and in fact career suicide for many women).
The point is, the incidents are a pleasant distraction. They are pleasant because I have to deal with shitheads like this constantly, and seeing one of them get his comeuppance is really nice.
Like, every so often someone posts a video where some bully messes with someone who looks helpless, like a small-framed woman or an elderly person, and then the victim turns out to be JUDO MASTER RAH! and totally busts the bully.
We laugh when that happens, because poetic justice is so rarely served. We get to enjoy the small things.
All the same, so many trans women are fired from their jobs shortly after transition. So many are forced to work in deeply shitty circumstances, exposed to hostile and aggressive transphobia, with few choices. So many are unemployed and get to play “job hunting while trans” — like my ex-g/f just went through that. Unlike me, she’s not a math geek who loves software. She’s a cook. She has a rough background. She couldn’t find work. So she ended up back at a terrible job she hates (but it’s a job!), plus public assistance. This is commonplace. All while macho-racist-mc-beltbuckle has no problem finding work, cuz he’s white and male and educated and tall and has great hair (cuz that’s how life works). A little tipping of the scales is nice to see.
Which, it always makes me cringe we people talk about symmetry. It’s like, they can fuck off with that shit. This is so utterly and preposterously asymmetric.
An asshole got fired. Cry me a river. I hope more do, but this a small thing.
So just pick off a few people for crimes against social justice to even the score? That sounds both effective and principled. /eyeroll.
That’s not what I said.
@Kate:
The false equivalency here is stunning. One group peacefully advocates for their own rights. The other uses violence to deny rights to others.
When it comes to free speech, the equivalence is not at all false. Both the Klan and LGBT advocacy groups have the right to have parades, or barbecues, or protests, or any other sort of peaceable assembly. The American tradition of free speech has a strong commitment to content neutrality, so if a form of expression is legitimate when used to support one point of view, it’s legitimate when used to express pretty much any other point of view. The alternative, in my opinion, really sucks, and there’s a lot of historical precedent to back up my point opinion.
Of course, if I were making the decision, I’d almost surely fire the Klansman as soon as possible, while the idea of firing a person for attending an LGBT parade is appalling. That’s because I think that there isn’t a free speech issue here at all.
In fact, one reason I’m so skeptical of using “free speech” as a rationale for restraining the actions of private actors is that doing so means turning more and more of life into a realm where one cannot distinguish between LGBT Rights Bingo Night and the American Nazi Party Clambake.
Employers firing sexists and racists for their comments harms me? Speak for yourself. I commend this employer for taking steps to remove a known misogynist harrasser from their employ and protecting their female employees from having to work with one. Not to mention all the women living in the apartment building he worked at, they surely are much safer with him gone as well. I wish all employers would be so proactive in ensuring a safe work environment for their female and minority employees and customers. I love it when white men speak as though what benefits mostly them benefits us “all”.
Wishing harm and suffering upon others? What a charming sense of morality.
It really depends on who the employer is and what the role of the employee is. At the far end of the spectrum regarding employer rights might be religious institutions, which can fire someone in a pastoral role for any reason. At the other end, with greatest employee rights, would be, perhaps, a tenured professor at a public university.
Wishing harm and suffering upon others? What a charming sense of morality.
Yeah, wanting people whose conduct merits firing to actually be fired is really the depths of depravity.
Sure, you may say, you don’t think this guy deserved to be fired for reasons that still aren’t clear to me, but that’s completely irrelevant as your objection would apply to wanting to see anyone fired for any reason. It proves way too much.
So do you think that a few distasteful online comments means someone deserves to be homeless and destitute? Or do you think its a good idea to have such people live off welfare and make no economic contribution to society because they’re “unemployable”? What’s the ideal outcome?
“Something something bootstraps” was the usual answer to this conundrum, I thought.
GENERAL MODERATION NOTE:
Everyone:
Please remember to try and dial down snark, withering sarcasm, and anything which could be taken as a tone of contempt.
It’s fine for you to use other tones elsewhere. But “Alas” has its own tone. Thanks for maintaining it.
This thread certainly isn’t a flamewar yet, but I’d like to extinguish it before it gets started.
LTL FTC:
I submit that there is a difference between (a) witnessing something and savoring a bit of schadenfreude, and (b) injuring someone and enjoying it.
Something like the difference between causing a funeral and sending a nice letter saying that you approve of it. Veronica neither caused the harm nor advocated for its cause. She simply noted that, in context, she didn’t care that the harm happened.
desipis:
Nor did she wish harm on others. But, by all means, continue to tell us, as we discuss things like a woman being told to sit on a knife so that she can never reproduce, that we should be “charming”.
Grace
There are a few issues that can be separated here:
• Should it be legal to fire an employee for non-work-related online behavior?
I lean toward “yes”, but then I lean toward a broad interpretation of “at-will employment”; if you believe employers should be restricted in firing for other non-job-related reasons I can see a similar argument to be made for protecting speech.
• Should employers fire people for being jerks online?
Depends: How big of a jerk? Does the person represent, or seem to represent your firm? (I changed the visibility of my employment status on Facebook when I realized the Facebook commenting plug-in listed me as “‹position› at ‹firm›” everywhere online.)
But the question most of this conversation seems to be addressing can be rephrased thus:
• Do we want a society where employers routinely police personal online behavior?
That’s a dangerous precedent to set. For one thing, assume you’ve “won the culture wars” in one instance. Congratulations: but you’ve just raised the stakes of losing from “I won’t be able to make the same jokes as I could before” to “I won’t be able to pay the rent”. Are you so sure that you’ll always be in the safe zone of the Overton window? (I’m referring not only to society values reverting, but also to those values moving further in some direction you may not be comfortable following. “The Jacobins are always surprised when the tumbrel arrives at their own doorstep. And it always does.”)
For another thing, how hard do you want your opposition to resist? If you make it too dangerous to lose a political battle, it won’t be long until that becomes a real battle. And then everyone loses, the only question is who loses more.
So do you think that a few distasteful online comments means someone deserves to be homeless and destitute?
I don’t see the relevance of the question. Your objection would apply just as well to any desire to see someone fired for their conduct, regardless of the nature of that conduct.
Nonetheless, with the information I have about the case at hand (which is not much), I’d say the ideal outcome is that Mr Nolan is able to find another job, and that he proceeds to keep it by not being such a wangrod in the future.
Where does glee over protestors “getting themselves shot” in the stomach fit into that tone?
Moderation has become far too selectively applied here. I’m bowing out. Happy trails.
I’m sorry to hear that, Mookie. I’ve enjoyed your comments here, and hope you return someday.
@J. C. Salomon — You might not realize this, but I’m a visibly transgender woman, so the idea that I am inside some protected “Overton window” is very naïve. To be honest, it’s a bit insulting. The culture war for me is hardly won. In fact, I’m kind of on the front line, where (for example) there are active efforts to pass legislation to ban those like me from public restrooms. My sisters face staggering levels of unemployment, violence, homelessness, HIV, and so on. It’s really terrible. Meanwhile, the idea that I should be literally stoned to death is fairly commonplace, at least inside the darker right-wing fever dreams.
You understand, those people are serious. Do you really mean to suggest I’m clueless about what losing the culture war means?
I’m not young. In fact, I was two years old when Stonewall happened. So yeah, I don’t remember the riots. But the point is, I grew up in thick of the post-Stonewall struggle. I was in high school when AIDS hit, and when the Reagan administration did nothing for four years while the epidemic raged. I have no illusions about why the disease was allowed to spread. In their minds, dead faggots were a feature not a bug.
I remember when the culture war let us die by the tens of thousands.
Oh, and sometimes we lost our jobs.
But seriously, people then hid. Being out was strange.
But for me there is no “closet.” I mean, it’s different when you’re gender-weird. Most LGB people are not. We trannies get it bad from every side.
We still lose our jobs at an alarming rate. Personally I’m lucky. I mean, I’m a preposterous tranny who never finished high school. I should have failed. But by some curious fate I turned out a math genius who likes writing software, and there was this “culture thing” that led the tech companies to be unusually progressive.
So yay me. Whatever. I get to watch my ex-g/f barely hold on. I get to watch her hunt for jobs. I get to deal with the aftermath of the last guy who attacked her with a knife. Last night I happened to see her at a bar, and we ended up fighting because some drag queen we know got her throat cut the other night, and that triggered my ex, and I’m a shitty ex-g/f who doesn’t know when to shut up, and things got bad. So blah.
But I live in some wonderful “Overton window” of tolerance? What the fuck?
Here’s my point: our being “nice” in the culture war is pointless, since “niceness” was never an option. Pluralism was never an option. They really hate us that much, and if you listen they will tell you, in detail.
I think I’m pretty charitable when the worst I advocate is publicly exposing their shitty behavior. I wouldn’t stab them. Or let them die from AIDS.
When some fucking douchebag loses his job? Seriously, shrug. I run into guys like that all the time. I doubt they’ll all get fired. That seems unrealistic. But still, I’m not going to cry for this one. Honestly, knowing he got fired pleases me.
Big picture? I’m happy to be nice to those who are nice to me. I’m serious. That’s how I live my life. I don’t start shit with random people. But if you come at me, I got claws.
No one made him call her a slut.
Stop abusing women, minorities, and queers. We fight back. Sometimes we win.
In Oregon about 25 years ago, a business owner whose customer base included many public employees advocated a law hampering union activity. In response, the government employees’ union organized a boycott, which the business owner deemed a violation of his free speech rights. I cannot remember exactly which dispute this was or what business owner was affected, but the boycott was not deemed a violation of free speech.
You might say “just because the fellow is a member of the American Nazi Party is no reason for Hebrew National to can a competent butcher. He does not say anything about this stuff at work.” Alack & alas, Hebrew National might well face a loss of customers if they kept such a person as an employee.
The manner of notifying Meriton Apartments ensured its customers’ awareness of the employee’s post & racist jokes; Mr. Nolan would still be employed were it not for Ms. Ford’s act. If someone took a video of you cursing after you stubbed your toe & ensured customers of your employer saw you cursing by posting a link on your employer’s Facebook page, you would likely want to sue that person.
@Grace
“It seems relevant to me that Nolan left the comment on Ford’s Facebook page. This is the online equivalent to saying something directly to someone’s face.”
Is it any less “directly to someone’s face” to post a tweet @apersonstwitterhandle calling them a “dipshit”, “fuckface” or “dickhead”?
“And since, on his own Facebook page, one click away, he identifies his employer, this is rather like saying something directly to someone’s face while wearing the company’s T-shirt.”
And on her twitter page, one click away is her employer’s twitter account.
Would it be reasonable for the recipients of her abusive tweets to complain to her employer?
Ampersand, you quoted Grace in your post asking “Out of curiosity, what would you rather Ford had done, other than ignore it?”
How would you answer that question, given that, in the cultural climate we live in (as opposed to the one you advocate), it’s reasonably foreseeable that a person might be fired if you report their abuse to their employers?
“We still lose our jobs at an alarming rate.”
But this is exactly what makes people uncomfortable about people losing their jobs over their behavior outside the job.
It makes the HR and marketing departments of major corporations the powers in charge of policing our culture, and those seem like the absolute worst people to put in charge of our moral and cultural norms.
Do I feel schadenfreude when those people use that power to smush some deserving asshole under their giant thumb? Sure, but it’s the exact same power they use to crush whistle-blowers , unions and complainers and oddballs of all stripes.
I can’t be happy they have that power, and I certainly can’t trust them to use it responsibly because public opinion has swung my way in the last decade.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
I totally understand why they want that power, because it is, at heart, about free association; the ability to remove yourself from the vicinity of people who act in ways that are disgusting and the ability to not subsidize assholes by giving them their money.
Those are all admirable drives.
ON THE THIRD HAND
Ultimately somebody is going to have to give this asshole a job and a place to live; I suppose we could let him freeze to death in the gutter, but that seems disproportionate for saying bad words. We all know that you don’t just go get a job as soon as you want one; if it was that easy employers wouldn’t have so much leverage over their workers, in all the ugly ways that they do.
A solution that decoupled survival from employment would solve both problems. It seems unlikely we’ll see that any time soon, though.
It wasn’t glee. If anything it was melancholic frustration at watching another carriage derail in the slow motion train wreck that is current leftist politics.
pillsy:
There’s a distinct difference between firing someone for conduct directly related to their job, and firing someone on the basis that their conduct makes them unsuitable for any job. The former leaves open opportunities for alternative (albeit likely less rewarding and glamorous) employment, the later is akin to economic banishment.
The assumption that someone who gets fired for being a jackass online is going to be completely unable to change their conduct is… more than a little strange.
@Christopher:
But this is exactly what makes people uncomfortable about people losing their jobs over their behavior outside the job.
The calls are, so to speak, coming from inside the house. The power is there, pretty much implicitly in the way employee-employer relations are structured in the US, it gets used from time to time (more than “from time to time”, given the existence of workplace drug testing), and there’s no particularly convincing mechanism being offered to stop it from being used that way.
What you’re effectively saying to targets of racist, sexist or homophobic abuse online is that, in the name of free speech, they should refrain from telling the truth about what these assholes are doing, on the grounds that the social consequences for those abusers would be disproportionately severe if their already-public conduct were more widely reported. In doing so, you strip those targets of one of the few tools they have to fight back against that abuse, and the one that is most frequently cited as the appropriate way to combat despicable speech in a society where free speech rights are protected.
Tenter:
Probably not. Do two wrongs make a right?
Sure. And I’m pretty certain that some of them have.
I think that Amp and I were really hoping that the person we asked that question would answer it, before you or others try to turn it around and demand that we answer it. Strictly speaking, he kinda did, but his “solution” doesn’t seem like it would lead away from the kind of discourse everyone here is lamenting: he said that she put herself out there publicly, so she should accept being a punching bag as “an inherent part of living in a free society”, and also, she “is entitled to respond in kind.” But I can’t help but note that when she does respond in kind (more or less; I haven’t seen her suggesting anyone should sit on a knife to cut their genitals or that someone would jibber less if they someone’s genitals in their mouth), people call her a hypocrite. So, she has two alternatives: take it, or reply and be dismissed as a hypocrite.
Wow. Hard to figure why anyone could be unhappy with a sweet deal like that!
It seems to me that if you want someone to change their behavior, “lie back and take it” should not be the suggested alternative course of action.
Also, it seems that we’ve gone from “speech” to “abuse”, and people still shouldn’t face a risk to employment for “abuse”. That’s interesting.
Grace
@Martial:
Alack & alas, Hebrew National might well face a loss of customers if they kept such a person as an employee.
It might also face a loss of other employees who don’t want to work with a Nazi. For that matter, the firm’s management might have an distinct aversion to employing a Nazi regardless of what their customers think about it.
I personally would find both impulses entirely understandable.
If this means that being a Nazi renders someone unemployable–homeless and destitute, even–I’m remarkably OK with that. They want far, far worse for me, my family, and many of my friends.
Tenter:
There’s certainly nothing stopping them from doing so.
@Desipis
“It wasn’t glee. If anything it was melancholic frustration at watching another carriage derail in the slow motion train wreck that is current leftist politics.”
A small group of white supremicists arrive at a protest, tooled up to commit violence and intending to provoke a pretext to do so, are successful in that aim. And this is the victims fault and a problem for leftist politics?
Tenter:
Well, yes, if you ignore the apparent criminal actions of the people I’m criticising, my criticism would seem rather vapid. I’m a little unclear as to why you’re ignoring those actions, but I’d guess it might have something to do with a desire to frame the issue as “good guys” vs “bad guys”, rather than something more like “idiots” vs “arseholes”.
@Grace
“Do two wrongs make a right?”
No, but only one of them is a hypocrite.
“Sure. And I’m pretty certain that some of them have.”
So am I. Yet she still has a job. Seemingly her employer is prepared to tolerate her online behaviour. And from that position of relative job security she caused someone who had engaged in behaviour no worse than her own to lose theirs.
“I think that Amp and I were really hoping that the person we asked that question would answer it, before you or others try to turn it around and demand that we answer it. Strictly speaking, he kinda did”
I’m not demanding anything from anyone. I asked Ampersand specifically, rather than you or anyone else, because there seems to be a conflict between him supporting Clementine making her complaint, which as you say, he kinda did, and his opposition to employers firing people for their online activities, and the latter is a foreseeable consequence of the former.
“”but his “solution” doesn’t seem like it would lead away from the kind of discourse everyone here is lamenting: he said that she put herself out there publicly, so she should accept being a punching bag as “an inherent part of living in a free society”, and also, she “is entitled to respond in kind.””
I’m not “everyone here” and the comments you quoted weren’t by me. I don’s see why I should have to answer for them.
“But I can’t help but note that when she does respond in kind (more or less; I haven’t seen her suggesting anyone should sit on a knife to cut their genitals or that someone would jibber less if they someone’s genitals in their mouth), people call her a hypocrite. So, she has two alternatives: take it, or reply and be dismissed as a hypocrite.”
Michael Nolan didn’t tell her to sit on a knife. Nor did he make the “jibber” comment. Those were other people. Michael posted a single word “slut”. And for this, she made a complaint which got him fired, which she then crowed about.
Nor was Clementine replying to abuse when she called people “dipshit”, “fuckface” and so on. In none of the tweets posted by Desipis above, where the tweet she was replying to is shown, was the person abusing her.
“Also, it seems that we’ve gone from “speech” to “abuse”, and people still shouldn’t face a risk to employment for “abuse”. That’s interesting.”
You’re putting words into my mouth. I haven’t said people shouldn’t face a risk to employment for abuse.
desipis:
Because the alleged degree of criminality isn’t really that unusual for protest movements left, right or center, and given that the white supremacists were engaged in a sham protest in order to start a fight and have an excuse to shoot BLM protesters, a bit hard to equate with simple idiocy.
It also casts considerable doubt that it was one of the protesters who started the fight by throwing a punch. I’m going to assume that if two groups of people get into a fight, and one of those groups of people consists of armed, armored and masked white supremacists who recorded a video bragging about their plans to start a race war beforehand are the ones who actually started things.
@desipis
“Well, yes, if you ignore the apparent criminal actions of the people I’m criticising, my criticism would seem rather vapid.”
That’s an ironic criticism coming from someone who in his initial comment on this topic ignored the behavior of the supremacists. The only thing that has been derailed here is the narrative you presented of peaceable citizen-journalists being set upon by a black mob.
@Ampersand:
It may be a foreseeable consequence, but it’s not the only one, and the employer has, well, agency. One of the many problems I have with the complaints about what Ms Ford did is that they seem to ignore the fact that Meriton Apartments is responsible for firing Mr Nolan. One could well think that Ms Ford acted in a reasonable fashion, but Meriton did not.
Given the general ineffectiveness of Facebook, law enforcement, et c. to deal effectively with campaigns of abuse, arguing that the targets of those campaigns should remain silent because the social consequences to the abusers seems to place the entire burden of a broader social problem on those targets. Making them responsible for the negative effects on those abusers’ careers also makes them responsible for even longer-lasting and deeper-seated problems that make employment so precarious and so necessary is even more unfair.
Even if you take Amp’s on employers firing people for online speech, I don’t think there’s anything particularly odd about thinking that Ms Ford’s course of action was acceptable in light of how lousy the alternatives are.
Tenter:
When I wrote “he” in that phrase, I was referring to desipis.
Yes, in response to her talking about receiving online abuse like being told to sit on a knife. Context matters. desipis has argued that Ford’s complaint to Nolan’s employer was more significant because the employer would fear her broadcasting platform. I agree that Ford was more likely to damage the hotel chain than some random Facebook user.
“Slut” was not a random single word which came out of nowhere. It was part of a pile-on.
You wrote the following, yes?
Grace
@Pillsy
“One could well think that Ms Ford acted in a reasonable fashion, but Meriton did not.”
One could well think the opposite. It’s reasonable for Meriton to fire an employee who engages in online abuse, but not reasonable for Clementine to have complained about abuse no worse than she perpetrates herself.
“arguing that the targets of those campaigns should remain silent because the social consequences to the abusers seems to place the entire burden of a broader social problem on those targets.”
I’ve not argued any such thing.
“Making them responsible for the negative effects on those abusers’ careers also makes them responsible for even longer-lasting and deeper-seated problems that make employment so precarious and so necessary is even more unfair.”
Ampersand said “Anything that normalizes the belief that employers should punish the off-work speech of their employers is harmful – not just to Michael Nolan, but to the free speech of everyone with a boss.”
Clementine said, in response to the firing “I’d also like to personally say a big well done to Meriton Apartments for taking this so seriously. It’s very reassuring to see a business adopt this policy towards their staff and I appreciate their handling of the matter.”
In what way is Clementine not normalizing the belief that employers should punish the off-work speech of everyone with a boss, at least in so far as that speech rises to the level of calling a person a “slut”? Is she not responsible for her own actions? Her own words?
“Even if you take Amp’s on employers firing people for online speech, I don’t think there’s anything particularly odd about thinking that Ms Ford’s course of action was acceptable in light of how lousy the alternatives are.”
That’s a bit like someone saying “I’m totally opposed to war, but in light of how lousy the alternatives are I think attacking ISIS in Syria is acceptable”. The alternatives are indeed lousy, but if you think attacking ISIS is acceptable then you’re not totally opposed to war. The two positions are mutually contradictory..
@Tenter:
I disagree; her alleged hypocrisy is irrelevant to whether her response to Nolan was reasonable. FWIW, I also disagree that the abuse he perpetrated is no worse than what she has perpetrated herself.
Sure, he thinks it’s harmful, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen Ampersand argue that no one, not even a private individual, should ever do anything harmful to free speech under any circumstances ever. I suspect that he regards free speech, at least in the broader sense of a a social norm guiding private actions, is one social good among many, and that tradeoffs against other goods are inevitable.
To use an actual parallel analogy, “I think war is always harmful, but in light of how lousy the alternatives are I think attacking ISIS in Syria is acceptable”. That’s a completely coherent position.
@Grace
“When I wrote “he” in that phrase, I was referring to desipis.”
My mistake.
““Slut” was not a random single word which came out of nowhere. It was part of a pile-on.”
I realize that. My view is that, if you engage in online abuse yourself, then you raise the bar as to what you can legitimately complain to a persons employer about to “significantly worse than anything I have said”.
“You wrote the following, yes?
…it’s reasonably foreseeable that a person might be fired if you report their abuse to their employers?”
There’s no “shouldn’t” in that sentence. Asking Ampersand how he reconciles two seemingly contradictory positions does not mean that I’ve taken a side on either of them.
@Pillsy
“I disagree; her alleged hypocrisy is irrelevant to whether her response to Nolan was reasonable. FWIW, I also disagree that the abuse he perpetrated is no worse than what she has perpetrated herself.”
You disagree. Fine. But it’s still a coherent position, and it’s reasonable for those who hold it to focus upon Clementine’s behavior rather than Meriton’s.
“Sure, he thinks it’s harmful, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen Ampersand argue that no one, not even a private individual, should ever do anything harmful to free speech under any circumstances ever. I suspect that he regards free speech, at least in the broader sense of a a social norm guiding private actions, is one social good among many, and that tradeoffs against other goods are inevitable.”
That would be fair enough if he had argued tradeoffs. But he hasn’t. His argument was “what else can she do”? That’s no better an argument in support of Clementine than “what else can we do?” is in support of attacking ISIS.
@Tenter:
He presents another good: creating a disincentive for harassers to harass. He even goes so far as to argue that reducing harassment is important to protect free speech. If you accept Amp’s premise that free speech can be threatened by private action, his point about harassment seems very hard to argue with, and more than justifies his request that people who object to Ms Ford’s complaints to Mr Nolan’s employer offer an alternative.
Tenter wrote:
Assuming people agree that context matters, I would like to hear the argument by which calling someone a slut in the context an unambiguously misogynist pile-on is not “significantly worst” than calling someone a dickhead because you didn’t like something they said (but not as part of a pile-on). Or even, how is it not significantly worst—given the context—than an admittedly at-best-in-poor-taste aside about doing violence to men in an otherwise thoughtful article about women’s responses to men’s violence against women. And just to be clear, I am not defending that aside; I am asking about how people who are arguing that Ford is no better than the people who attack her understand that equivalence, given the different contexts in which this online speech has occurred.
@Pillsy
“He presents another good: creating a disincentive for harassers to harass. He even goes so far as to argue that reducing harassment is important to protect free speech. If you accept Amp’s premise that free speech can be threatened by private action, his point about harassment seems very hard to argue with,”
Hard to argue with? Seriously?
Ampersand “”“It’s not unusual for me to field abuse like this, although it tends to be more of a constant drip than a deluge.” But this week, it’s a deluge. Because Michael Nolan got fired.”
Getting an abuser fired is about as effective a deterrent to other abusers as bombing Muslim countries is a deterrent to Islamic terrorism. The effect is, it makes the problem worse.
“and more than justifies his request that people who object to Ms Ford’s complaints to Mr Nolan’s employer offer an alternative.”
Which is just another way of saying “what else can we do?”. It’s just as lousy an argument here as when it is made by war supporters.
We don’t actually know the true reason Michael Nolan was fired. It is possible that this complaint was the last in a long line of complaints that enabled Meriton to get rid of a problem employee. Or it could be that Meriton was so nervous about their reputation that they fired Nolan for one comment. Or anything in between.
While I am not a fan of employers policing off-hours behavior, the reputation of a company can never be completely separated from public perception of its employees. That said, there are many things Meriton could have done instead in response without firing Nolan, but they chose not to for whatever reason. He could have been transferred to a non-customer facing position, if possible. He could have been asked to take a class on anger management (this happened to a former co-worker of mine after he pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault, which is admittedly a much more serious action than piling on to online verbal abuse). He could have been asked to remove the name of his employer from his online profile. The complaint could have been ignored. What happened is on Meriton, not on Clementine Ford. But she is still getting a lot of pushback.
I am OK with how Ford (who I had never heard of before) responded to online abuse. It always surprises me how people think electronic communication is completely private. I have seen some really crazy things put into group emails that then get forwarded all over the place to the shock of the originator, who then sometimes gets upset at the consequences (such as changes to their professional reputation).
I do not think that employers should care about what employees do in their off-hours unless it generates customer complaints. Businesses do tend to look out for their own interests, which is why employees have the limited legal protections they do. Even tenured professors are not completely immune from the consequences of their actions (for example Geoffrey Marcy, former astronomy prof at UC Berkeley). Nolan is free to look for another job, and it is unlikely this situation makes him unemployable.
@Richard
“Assuming people agree that context matters,”
And assuming people agree that ones own abuse raises the bar.
“I would like to hear the argument by which calling someone a slut in the context an unambiguously misogynist pile-on is not “significantly worst” than calling someone a dickhead because you didn’t like something they said (but not as part of a pile-on).”
I concede, I can’t think of one I’d be comfortable making.
And yet it sticks in the craw that someone who someone who routinely throws out insults such as “fuckface” and “dickhead” should then get someone fired over a single “slut” (even in the context of a misogynist pile-on) and then crow about it. It still feels like she has, by her own actions, lost the moral authority to make that complaint.
“Or even, how is it not significantly worst—given the context—than an admittedly at-best-in-poor-taste aside about doing violence to men in an otherwise thoughtful article about women’s responses to men’s violence against women. And just to be clear, I am not defending that aside; I am asking about how people who are arguing that Ford is no better than the people who attack her understand that equivalence, given the different contexts in which this online speech has occurred.”
I haven’t argued that. Nor have I argued that her aside in that article had any raising the bar effect.
@Tenter:
Yes, his point that harassment campaigns like the one targeting Ms Ford have serious implications for free speech follows pretty immediately from his position that individual action can be a threat to free speech. The deterrent effect argument is separable from that.
You know, I’m not convinced that it’s a lousy argument when it is made by war supporters, either. If a supporter of a war you opposed asked you that question, would you genuinely be unable to answer it in a sensible fashion? Would you actually be unable to offer an alternative course of action that you believe would lead to a better set of outcomes?
I’d be surprised if that were the case, and frankly, if that were the case I wouldn’t blame the war supporter for treating your objections with skepticism, even if I thought their position was completely wrong-headed.
I mean, I actually think Amp is seriously wrong about the free speech implications of what Ms Ford did (in that I believe it basically doesn’t have any). It was maybe disproportionate, but frankly what Mr Nolan did was so freaking stupid that it’s hard for me to muster any sympathy for him.
“Given the general ineffectiveness of Facebook, law enforcement, et c. to deal effectively with campaigns of abuse, arguing that the targets of those campaigns should remain silent because the social consequences to the abusers seems to place the entire burden of a broader social problem on those targets. ”
How did we get stuck on the fork where the only two possibilities are ‘lie back and take it’ and ‘essentially set up an ad such that any time someone looks at his employer’s facebook page they get “slut”‘? And let’s not pretend that she wasn’t trying to get him fired. She didn’t just ‘report’ him. She set it up so that any customer who looked at his employer’s page would see it.
You aren’t obligated to try to get someone fired for calling you a slut in a non-job related context are you? Isn’t it kind of like stalking to go out, find where someone works and engineer a publicity campaign to get them fired?
If a trans person started a conversation at a social gathering about how bad Trump was, and Christian woman said that she would pray for him not to go to hell for being trans, and he responded by telling her that busybody Christians should shut the fuck up, it would be rude of both of them though my sympathies would be strongly with the trans man because he shouldn’t have to put with that kind of crap.
But if she investigated him, found out where he worked, and made a campaign such that every time anyone looked up his job on google they would see reference to him saying that Christians should shut the fuck up–causing him to get fired–I would say that it was clear she had stalked him and that it wasn’t ok.
Similarly if the trans man had followed her, found out where she worked, and made a campaign such that every time anyone looked up her job they would see reference to her praying for trans people not to go to hell–causing her to get fired–I would say that it was clear he had stalked her and that it wasn’t ok.
Now my judgment on the merits of the conversation are clearly with the trans man. But my judgment on the merits of researching either side, finding out where they worked, and then setting it up so that their work’s facebook shows them being an ass in a outside setting until they get fired is that it isn’t ok. The stalking and doxxing isn’t generally a good response to nasty comments in an outside setting. Norms matter, and we will be a much better society if we settle on a norm where stalking and doxxing isn’t ok.
If someone calls me a faggot in public, and it has happened numerous times, it isn’t ok for me to follow them, find out where they work and try to get them fired. It just isn’t. The fact that it was easy for Ms. Ford to find out the employer by digging around Nolan’s facebook page doesn’t make it ok. Just because someone is easy to take advantage of doesn’t make it ok.
This is one of those situations where it happening in the cyber-sphere seems to dazzle people. If you did this outside of the cyber-sphere it would be absolutely clear that it wasn’t a good thing.
I’m not aware of this aspect of the case. How did she do this? Are you saying she left a comment on Meriton’s Facebook page?
Ampersand:
From what I understand Sebastian H’s description is a mischaracterisation. What she did was tag the Meriton’s account in a post to her own account, such that the person operating that account would be notified of her message, but also that the message would be read by everyone who follows her account or sees the likes and shares from friends.
She essentially put them in the position of either having to fire the employee or be publicly seen as implicitly condoning the behaviour. Cultural activists such as Ford have spend considerable effort establishing the social norm that anything short of an absolute reaction (in this case firing) to their complaints will be widely perceiving as condoning the criticised behaviour. The cultural climate is such that no sensible manager or marketing person could reasonably accept the risk to the company’s brand that comes from treating the employee with any sense of proportion or even work with them to educate and change their behaviour. The emotional cry of “Zero Tolerance” that Ford and her ilk like to make in regards to such things has come to mean zero sense of proportionality and zero room for practical or constructive solutions.
@Sebastian H:
When people started arguing that she should refrain from further publicizing his already-public conduct on the grounds that the negative social consequences were too severe while failing repeatedly to address the question, “What should she do instead?” Since any further publicization would carry the risk of potentially severe social consequences, including job loss, for Mr Nolan, it seemed like a fairly natural conclusion. If you can point me at the middle I’m excluding, please do.
Clicking on someone’s name when they leave a comment on one of your Facebook posts and noticing the first piece of information visible in their public profile seems absolutely nothing at all like stalking to me. I do it all the time without really even thinking about it.
If you see someone walks out of their place of employment after work, wearing their uniform, and they yell homophobic slurs pretty soon afterward, I can’t really imagine why it’s not OK to try to get them fired.
Whereas I think the properly analogous IRL behavior is pretty obviously acceptable, and comparisons to stalking (or suggestions that doxxing was involved) simply make no sense to me, because the relevant “stalkery” piece of information was obvious to a casual observer, and the link Ms Ford made between Mr Nolan’s gross online conduct and his employer was only a bit more direct than the one he’d made himself.
@Kate-
Yes, because people who engage in hyperbole are the worst fucking monsters on the planet!
(Edited: I had a paragraph about the dramatic and graphic ways that people who utilize the literary device known as hyperbole should commit suicide, but I re-read Amp’s request to dial down the snark and I deleted it.)
“If you see someone walks out of their place of employment after work, wearing their uniform, and they yell homophobic slurs pretty soon afterwards”
Is that really equivalent to having your work visible on your FB page? I think few people would really think they’re making such a strong connection between their workplace and everything they say and do on Facebook by entering this information and making it publically visible.
If I have my spouse’s name visible on my FB page, can they be considered similarly associated with everything I do on FB?
Is that really equivalent to having your work visible on your FB page?
I kinda think it is. I don’t list my current place of employment on my FB page at all (and certainly not on my public profile!) to avoid precisely that kind of issue. In any event, having the info there obviates the need for any sort of stalking or doxxing to find out who employs you.
Way back in my misspent youth, an obsessive neo-Nazi sock puppeteer tried to get me kicked out of college for some mix of being Jewish, being pro-choice, and having the temerity for insulting him for being, well, a neo-Nazi. Since I’d been putting my college email address on my posts, I certainly didn’t feel stalked by the dude. (Actually, I found the whole thing hilarious, and of course it went precisely nowhere.)
I put my employer on my FB page. Of course, I set my privacy settings to generally “friends only” for most things — cuz I’m smart that way — but still. I don’t hide where I work.
I don’t list my employer on my Tumblr page, not that it’s a big secret. It would be easy enough to track me down. But the point is, the things I’m “in to,” which might be a bit outside the mainstream, are all things that don’t hurt people, so I’m not really worried. As I mentioned above, some of my coworkers are outspoken neo-reactionaries. I doubt my kinda-lukewarm feminism will be a problem.
I get that not everyone is in that position. But still, lots of people seems committed to finding “general principles” about social stuff. Which fine. I understand that desire. We all like to be little baby Kants building our categorical imperatives.
Of course, there is no one right way to categorize stuff. So that’s inconvenient.
Anyway, I look at moral society as a big, hyper-complex, semi-chaotic churning mass of people doing their best, and people doing the opposite of their best, and people’s “rules” aren’t actually going to work, partly cuz few will follow them, and mainly cuz even if they did, this big, hyper-complex, semi-chaotic churning mess will find ways to turn your rules to crap before your eyes. Your rules will lead you over a cliff, and if you’re smart you’ll re-think them often.
#####
I’m pulling back the lens a lot here.
It turn out that the modern workplace is becoming rather hostile to crass, abusive men. This is obviously a result of feminism, but it is also the result of the “corporitization of late capitalism” — which is a term I just invented, but there is clearly a sense that the modern workplace is governed by big service-oriented companies in ways it was not for my parents. In short, there are fewer “rough and tumble” factory type jobs, and instead more office jobs — plus retail. Even warehouse jobs these days are “Amazon style warehouses,” with tons a rules, domineering mid-level-managers, and background checks. This is a tough age.
So blah. This is great for me. This sucks for rough working-class fellows. I don’t have a solution for this. I certainly don’t want to work with “uses violence to solve problems” guy. I can say to him, hey, stop being that guy, but what if he doesn’t?
@veronica d:
Very well said. This is something I always find myself circling around in these conversations and never really say at all, let alone this clearly.
Amp, you write “I’m not aware of this aspect of the case. How did she do this? Are you saying she left a comment on Meriton’s Facebook page?”, but you mention this aspect in the original post.
“Ford posted a screenshot of Nolan’s “slut” comment, along with screenshots of him reposting or agreeing with a couple of racist jokes. She linked her post to the Facebook page of Nolan’s employer, Meriton Apartments – meaning that whoever runs Meriton’s facebook page would be notified about her post.”
You say “posting a link” but that makes it sound like a blog here. For a blog on the web, posting a link is a mostly passive act, you are pointing to a reference which ends up being a one way thing. On Facebook, you are describing posting to someone’s page. On Facebook, unless they have their privacy settings just right, posting onto their page is much more active–you are making your post visible on their page for all their followers and visitors. Now for the most part the etiquette with Facebook is that you don’t post on people’s page unless you know them and have their permission. And savvy users lock it out so no one can post on their page without permission. But the default settings are such that when you post on someone’s facebook page, their friends and followers all see it on THEIR feeds, and anyone who goes to look on your wall sees it.
There is NO WAY that she posted on their facebook page without that being an absolutely positive attempt to get him fired. This wasn’t an “oops publicity over in one area gets someone fired” accident. This was going over to his employer, and trying to publish to all of their customers about this guy.
The whole discussion seems to center around the idea that she was just publicizing harassment of her on her facebook page and it went viral, causing him to get fired. (Hence all the worry about her needing to “just take it”). She didn’t just refer to his employer in a post like you might here. She didn’t even just complain to his employer. She used facebook to to use his employer’s facebook page to publish the comment to his employers potential customers. Now from a free speech point of view she has a right to try to do that. But we shouldn’t act as if it is the same thing as just not wanting to be forced to take abuse. This isn’t even the Adria Richards kind of case where she had a tweet go out of control resulting in some people getting fired. This is a much clearer case where Ford researched who his employer was and went to get him fired.
@SebastianH,
It doesn’t sound like what you’re describing actually happened. What the original post describes, and what desipis described, was a post to Ford’s *own* Facebook page/group/whatever, in which she tagged Meriton’s page much in the way I tagged your name at the top of this post to bring it to your attention. Only on Facebook, there’s a site function that allows users to do so actively, meaning that whoever runs the Meriton account would have received a notification of her post. This would not appear on Meriton’s page, though. Only on Ford’s.
So no, she couldn’t have published it in a forum where Meriton customers could see it, unless they happen to also be fans of hers. Only her own page’s readership and the Meriton account owner could see it.
It’s possible that tagging someone gives them the option of adding that post to their timeline–I know Facebook gives me that option, I’m not sure if corporate pages get a similar option. But it’s an opt-in feature, meaning no posts containing Meriton’s tag would appear on their page unless they specifically approved them to do so.
[edited to clarify my meaning in some places]
This sucks for rough working-class fellows.
Excuse me? “Working class” is not synonymous with “verbally abusive asshole”. Why would you make this statement in conjunction with a conversation about a specific man who was a supervisor?
That status is salient to the conversation. The reason why workplaces are tightening up on abusive behavior has to do with liability—including possible future liability if a reasonable argument could be made that an employer knew of a supervisor’s propensity for abuse, but did nothing about it. Visible evidence of Nolan posting “slut” to Ford, and Meriton’s knowledge of it, could be a factor in some future suit of sexual harassment at a Meriton worksite. But since they fired him, it won’t be—now, Meriton can provide evidence of a “zero tolerance policy” to any future claims. Now, doing “something” about it doesn’t necessarily require firing; it could mean such things as anger management or sexual harassment classes, loss of a promotion, unpaid leave, that sort of thing. But whether or not an employer is going to invest that much in a particular worker that has done something that isn’t criminal, but is likely to result in some sort of liability rests on (a) whether that person has a union contract, or (b) if said person has unique skills or knowledge that would be very difficult to replace. (B) isn’t all that common in this economy.
With that said, I find the idea of linking to one’s employer on Facebook really, truly bizarre. I’m a union electrician, and while I’m not on Facebook (although it’s likely in the future that I will be, as work has really dried up in my locale and Facebook is the means for “brothers and sisters” to keep in touch and find traveling buddies), a lot of my fellow union members are. NO ONE makes any mention of their employer on Facebook, let alone any links. Ever. That’s like the third rail. It doesn’t have anything to do with fear of one’s employer seeing an opinion, language, or photo that the employer may not approve of….it’s more an issue of boundaries. People in my world do not view employers as friends. In labor history, the past practice of employer paternalism never ended well for workers—hence the common practice today of putting a granite wall between yourself and your employer. (this is probably amplified in my specific world, the world of construction, by the fact that we work for many, many contractors over the course of our careers. We’re mercenaries, not loyalists! *smile*).
Now, what I said above about union contract? Many union contracts have specific disciplinary process and procedures written in. Mine doesn’t drill down very deep in that area, but all contractors these days have written sexual harassment and workplace violence policies that are part and parcel of being hired—you sign on knowing that if you violate their policy, termination can be a result. Since my contract doesn’t have step-procedures for violation of those policies (we have step procedures for substance abuse), it is understood by everyone that “firing” (which in practice almost always means “layoff”—yes, there is a difference) will be the result. As a consequence, there is almost never a violation of those particular policies. You’re far less likely to experience sexual harassment or an abusive environment in construction (at least, the unionized worksite) than you are in an office or corporate environment.
This is just the pot calling the kettle black.
A few of the crummy insults of the pot have been mentioned above. I realize, though, that her funny comment about going on a rampage and killing a third of men is just an aside in an otherwise thoughtful article. And the unwillingness to look at her other comments is just weird.
What I am curious about is the motivation on this board to be so one-sided. I would really like it if someone could tell me what motivates you people, but I realize that I will likely not get a straight answer. From experience, I expect mostly insults in response, but I hope that I will be pleasantly surprised with some insight into the real motivation for this.
Clementine Ford is classier than I thought. It seems she’s tacitly admitted to sending pictures of mutilated genitalia to someone who criticised her.
Just in case anyone was tempted to take Desipis ludicrous claim about “mutilated genitalia” seriously, the pic in questions is the first one here.
—Myca
Myca,
Looks like suggested mutilation to me. It’s really, really, really funny (/sarcasm). But I get it: Since she’s an innocent victim by default – as a woman – this is all just trumped-up BS.
This is just one example of many. This is truly a nasty, man-hating woman. I don’t know what else to say. And I go back to my question about why you want to defend this nasty woman.
@desipis:
@Wissig:
So desipis said Ms Ford “tacitly admitted” to doing a thing. She did not do that thing, which you yourself acknowledge. Myca accurately points out that desipis is wrong and she did not do the thing desipis accused her of… and your question is why people are defending her?
Maybe people would feel less impulse to defend her if the charges being made were actually, well, true.
pillsy:
I think that Myca’s objection was to the characterization, not to the existence.
But when I get a response like you tendered, and you don’t even get what the issue is, I am going to check out of this board. You will likely be supported by many here, who don’t even understand the issue, because you are on “their side”.
You win, sweetie.
Bye, Wissig! I hope that you find a new board somewhere which lives up to your exacting standards.
Desipis, as Pillsy and Myca have pointed out, your claim was flat-out untrue. Did you misunderstand the tweets you read?
What do you think she was trying to convey with that picture?
Also, the default facebook setting is that if you link to someone, the post you are linking appears in their feed. I don’t however see any reporting on how the linking played out, so I don’t know whether or not the hotel chain had the default settings on (which would be stupid, but typical). In any event it is clear that by researching and linking to his employer, she was trying to get him fired. It wasn’t a side effect, it was an aim.
Amp, you touch on the idea of disproportionate response, but you don’t go anywhere with it except to say “But if I think of it as an ongoing problem – people (mostly men) are persistently sending her online abuse because they have no incentive to stop – then Ford’s policy of outing her harassers, when she can, seems like the only tool she has for creating a disincentive for harassers.”
There are a number of things that don’t sit well with me on this. From a societal perspective we can agree that the weight of continued abuses can add up, without agreeing that one man should take the collective punishment for all of them. Upthread we hear a litany of abuses that Ford has bourne, and then seem to be expected to agree that because one man said that he hoped she would sit on a knife so she couldn’t reproduce, that some other man ought to lose his job for calling her a slut, which is a slur with a relatively low level of nastiness. Now if this were the same man, we could say that the slut comment was a last straw, but it is a different man with literally only a single word comment. The justification for turning that single word comment into her seeking the loss of his job seems to be that she has to go after SOMEONE. But that is literally the logic that leads toward Muslims being oppressed for saying Allahu Akbar at the wrong time, or beating a ten year old who throws a rock at a tank. Responses should be proportionate TO THE PERSON WHO HAS DONE WRONG. If this post had been about the person who said that she should be gang raped by black men getting fired because she notified his employer, I would say that the result was more proportionate (though I still have qualms about employers policing outside life). But instead we are talking about someone who called her a slut and then justifying the proportion of the response because he is of an associational class or the same gender as the other guy.
Now I have personally been chased down the street by a group of street thugs (white) who apparently wanted to beat me up for being a faggot. If I had gotten the chance, they would be in jail. I have also been called a faggot by lots of other people in public settings, but it wouldn’t be proportionate for me to research them (however easily) and try to get them fired. The linkage between a culture of literal faggot-bashing and merely calling someone a faggot is at least as close if not much closer than the link between wanting to destroy someone’s uterus with a knife and calling a woman a slut. The collective weight of a lifetime of dealing with homophobia is not justly visited on a person who merely slurs me.
If it isn’t a proportionate response for the actual act, it isn’t proportionate. (See also just war theory and the theory of protection for civilians).
Collective guilt isn’t justice.
[Footnote, I don’t want to muddy the water with hate crimes legislation. Insofar as hate crimes legislation is legitimate, it is when the crime intentionally invokes the threat of larger violence eg. burning crosses to invoke fear of being lynched. I’m not comfortable with it is merely a ‘some victims are better than other victims’ concept although it seems to be expanding that way]
I’m also checking out here. You can ban me with a smirk, Ampershit.
I won’t personally do it, but I hope that someone organizes a campaign against your patreon supporters, you transparent POS.
Agreed – POS. Bans according to content.
So is creating three different sock puppet accounts so you can flounce off in unison a sign of advance planning and patience, or is it just sad?
I don’t think getting fired was “justice,” Sebastian. Rather, I think it’s an unfair world, in which unjust and unfair things happen.
1) It’s unfair that so many people have to deal with abusive assholes like Michael Nolan.
2) It’s unfair that many people are afraid to speak out because of abusive assholes like Michael Nolan.
3) And it’s unfair (because disproportionate) that Michael Nolan was fired for this. (If he was fired just for this – we don’t actually know.)
I don’t understand the logic that says that the first two items on that list are so minor and unimportant that they barely need to be acknowledged (when they are acknowledged at all), while the third item on that list is of catastrophic importance and the one thing that should get virtually all focus. But that seems to be what Ford’s critics believe, judging by what they talk about.
Since you and several others have asked, I don’t think Ford should have contacted Nolan’s employer. That was disproportionate. (And although it was not certain Nolan would be fired, Ford obviously knew it was a possibility). If Ford were an ideal person delivering an ideal individually calibrated response to each and every one of the many strangers who contact her with misogynistic abuse, then she wouldn’t have done that in response to Nolan’s relatively minor infraction.
But I also think that attempting to police the proper scope and scale of Ford’s response to the many dozens of random trolls who are reaching out to her with misogynistic slurs is the least useful response imaginable.
To make an analogy: I’m not interested in going to someone who was being spat on by a mob – a mob that has been in the habit of spitting on people, particularly women, whom they disagree with – and saying “When you slapped that one spitter in the face, that was disproportionate! And why slap that guy, when there were other guys positively flooding phlegm on you, and that guy just drizzled a little spittle?” I’m even MORE not interested in it when there are so many people out there screaming at her for slapping that guy who don’t even seem to acknowledge that the mob of spitters did anything wrong, or that the person who was slapped bears any responsibility for what occurred, or that the entire problem (slap included) would have been avoided if they just didn’t make a habit of spitting on strangers.
In my analogy, those who think that the slap is the most crucial part of this situation to address, have their priorities screwed up.
Ampersand:
Yes, I misunderstood the tweets.
However, the picture Ford tweeted (thanks for the link Myca) puts her level of rhetoric clearly on par with the “sit on a knife” style that others were claiming were worse than simple name calling (albeit no where near as bad as sending pictures of actual genitalia).
Ampersand, speaking for myself, I’m far less interested in the individual disproportionate reaction itself, than I am in the mainstream publication of arguments claiming it was a morally righteous act and that such disproportionate reactions ought to be encouraged.
Desipis:
So a dude reached out to her – out of the blue, as far as I can tell – to call her a man-hater. She responded with a photo of a sausage being sliced. That’s a joke of the “yes, you’re right, I’m an eeeeevvvviiiil man-hater who drinks only male tears” variety.[*]
And it’s not remotely as bad as reaching out to a total stranger, who hasn’t contacted you at all, because they posted a nude photo of themselves (with a comment about how there’s nothing shameful about taking nude selfies), with “I hope you sit on a butcher’s knife so that you can’t reproduce.”
That you can’t see the huge and obvious difference between these two things makes me feel pretty hopeless.
[*] Similarly, did you ever see “The Misogynist Bunch” pillows? It’s a joke pillow A Voice For Mem sells (or used to sell) which shows AVFM people arranged like The Brady Bunch and captions “The Misogynist Bunch” in jolly happy lettering. The point of the pillow is to make fun of how often AVFM is called misogynistic. Just like feminists make jokes about being called man-haters. Neither joke is offensive to me.
Tenter:
I don’t think that your argument proves what you’re saying. Yes, in the short term, Ford gets a torrent of hate. But Ford’s stated goal isn’t to prevent herself from getting a short-term torrent of hate; it’s to create a change of atmosphere in the long run which make misogynists feel that, in general, sending misogynistic slurs (and the like) to women on social media might carry consequences.
You’re like someone saying “look, this battle is lost. Clearly the entire war strategy is a dud!” Maybe it’s a dud, maybe not, but you can’t really conclude that from looking at just one battle.
I agree with Pillsy’s response to this. (And really, with most of what Pillsy has written.)
Pillsy:
I think it’s a mistake to think of free speech issues in terms of “do we have sympathy for this person?” It’s common for free speech violations to happen to people who are extremely unsympathetic. (Think of Nazis marching in Skokie.)
I don’t have much sympathy for Nolan.
But I do think there’s a very great danger to free speech in people thinking that it’s acceptable to handle political disagreements by trying to get the person they disagree with fired. And I think there’s a very great danger in anything that encourages employers to police employee’s off-work speech.
I don’t think this stops with Michael Nolan. I think that there are lots of people – including people I have loads of sympathy with – who are worried that they could get in trouble with their boss, or even fired, if their boss finds out their political or social views. And I think this chills free speech. So for me, this really isn’t about Nolan.
La Lubu:
This is a good point.
But as for the rest – I’m actually not sure if what you’re saying is applicable to this particular case, since the fired man was Australian. Do you know if what you’re saying about union contracts and liability is as true in Australia as it is here? (I’m not asking to be obnoxious, I honestly don’t know.)