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. [↩]
First of all, define “demonizing”. I have the feeling I define it differently than you do.
Second, “humanizing the oppressed” must go hand-in-hand with civil rights laws in order to be effective. When it gets down to the brass tacks, I can chalk up the fact that I have a warm home and food in my belly tonight to two primary laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX (1972). Without them, any amount of being nice, trying harder/working harder, learning as much as I can, attempting to see things from my oppressor’s point of view in order to better communicate with them and pretty-please…..it all would have been for naught (as indeed it was for others in decades previous). The example you gave about LGBT people relies heavily on the previous battles won by other justice movements that set the framework for greater equality, in much the same way the feminist movement relied heavily on the previous battles won in the civil rights movement. It wasn’t just LGBT people coming out or positive representations in pop culture—it was the domino effect of various states enacting legislation that added sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights. That legislation got passed by activists, some of them militant, and the first battles were very contentious—the same way equality was won for other oppressed peoples.
Oppression is about power, who has it and who doesn’t. I’m solely interested in oppressors not being able to inflict oppression upon me; their ideology is a matter for their own conscience. I don’t care what is in their hearts and minds. I don’t care if I can change their hearts and minds. I just want their behavior to either change, or for the situation to be such that if they insist upon behaving in a way that attempts to impose oppression, they “play to an empty room”—that is, their attempts are completely ineffectual. Want to believe women shouldn’t have “men’s jobs”? Hell, go for it! Believe it all you want—just as long as it doesn’t have any impact on my being employed in a so-called “man’s job”, and doesn’t affect my conditions of work there.
I think it’s also important to remember that when “humanizing the oppressed” (and let’s get real: that means having a certain burden placed upon oppressed people to prove our humanity—and yes, I realize you’re in this position too. Just saying it serves us well to tacitly admit it’s an unjust burden placed upon us that requires extra energy and emotional labor), we’re not focusing our efforts on those who hate us. We’re focusing our efforts on those who swear they don’t hate us, but seem to be fence-sitting. We’re focusing on the people who claim neutrality, and placing targeted moral pressure to get them to put some action towards a side. That’s why they’re called “movements”.
No one has said, or even implied this. What happened in this case is that Nolan had the misfortune of working, in a supervisory position at that, for a company that is dependent upon a good public image for their bottom line. By identifying himself with his employer on Facebook, he opened the door for clients and potential clients to identify his actions with that of his employer—a bad move anytime, but especially when part of one’s job entails access to the private information and spaces of one’s clients. Really, once the cat was out of the bag, what were Nolan’s employers supposed to do? The only way the damage would be effectively mitigated was by terminating him. (and again, it is entirely possible that he violated a company policy that he signed—either by using company tools or tech to deliver his message, or by identifying himself with his employer on Facebook. Many of the contractors I’ve worked for have a social media policy designed to strongly discourage people from simultaneously behaving like assholes while identifying themselves with “XYZ Electric”. It’s an effective policy, and those companies are easier to work for.)
I haven’t seen any mention of where trust and social cohesion fit in all this. Surely you realize that Nolan’s particular behavior was enough to violate trust of Meriton clients both current and potential?
I also need to say that I have never seen this vocabulary used anywhere outside of MRA sites. You may not be an MRA, desipis, but if it looks like a duck and so on. Anyway it really takes away from your credibility as a disinterested observer from my POV.
Sebastian:
As I understand your framing of it, humanizing the oppressed is broadly speaking about making the oppressed visible “as regular people,” to use your phrase, to the oppressor, in particular when the oppressor has most probably not had “regular contact” with members of the oppressed group. This makes sense to me. I have a hard time, however, understanding what it would mean in this case to “humanize women,” not so much as an overall strategy, but as a practical matter—what should Ford—assuming, for the moment, that it is fair to ask her to bear this burden—or Meriton for that matter, have done to help Nolan see women as fully human?
@Sebastian:
I’ll cop to a substantial amount of “good job privilege”, since, well, my job is pretty good along almost any axis I can think of (like many other good jobs, maintaining work-life balance is tough). Does that influence how I think about Mr Nolan’s firing? That seems like it would be a silly thing to deny.
Nonetheless, just because I’m a privilege-choked asspuppet[1] doesn’t mean I’m wrong, though everyone involved should adjust their priors for pillsy-wrongness upwards if they haven’t already. I keep coming back to the way that Mr Nolan didn’t take even the most basic steps to separate his employer from the place that he posted his garbage[2]–he even went a bit out of his way to link them to it. I think everybody should be able to grasp a principle as basic as, “Don’t shit where you eat.”
I understand that you’re really worried about employers intruding on their employees’ private lives. I don’t think you’re wrong to be concerned, even though I think it’s a little strange to focus so intently on marginal intrusions like this one. But I do think that employees should do the bare minimum to keep their jobs separate from their personal lives[3], too, or else their complaints look pretty silly.
[1] I saw “privilege-choked asspuppet” in a Pandagon comment thread years ago; to this day it’s one of my favorite Internet insults.
[2] On at least three occasions. Ms Ford was able to point to a couple racist jokes on his wall in addition to the “slut” remark.
[3] If his supervisor at Meriton Apartments had fired him after catching him making the “slut” post on Facebookwhile at work, would you really think that was terribly unjust even if he wasn’t violating rules by using FB on the job?
I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to look at other possible life consequences, and whether we’d think of Ford’s actions as inappropriate in those contexts. Like what if she’d emailed his wife “Look at how your husband treats women online”? What if his wife (understandably) left him as a result?
Would we be saying that Ford’s actions were disproportionate?
Would we be putting the primary onus of responsibility for the outcome on Ford or on Mr. Nolan’s (probably mythical) wife?
In terms of life-trauma, losing a job is far less traumatic than losing a marriage (IME, anyway), so it seems like the moral calculus as to Ford’s actions ought to be pretty close to the same.
—Myca
New rule: Don’t call people slurs on the internet under your real fucking name if you want your employer to continue to associate themselves with you. I have very little sympathy for this jackass.
Sebastian @197
I fundamentally disagree with the characterization that Nolan was fired for “calling someone a slut off the job.”
1.) You keep ignoring that context matters.
1a.) Nolan did not write “slut” in a vacuum. He wrote in on a woman’s Facebook page in support of people who had written much more vile comments. In doing so he was endorsing and supporting those views.
1b.) There were also numerous racist posts on his own Facebook wall.
1c.) He was clearly identified with his employer when he made those statements.
2.) You keep ignoring that we do not know the whole story.
2a.) We do not know that he was “off the job.” He could have been doing these things on company time and/or company equipment.
2b.) We do not know that the things Ford brought to his employer’s attention were the only factor in his firing, or whether there had been complaints about him in the past.
In any case, I still think that IF firing him was wrong that is on his employer, not Ford.
Any day, a client could have come upon Nolan’s Facebook page and complained to his employer. Would they have been wrong to do so? I don’t think so, and I don’t think Ford was in the wrong either.
Richard, I think the humanizing thing is a bit narrower. The women a man like Nolan calls a slut are “other” women to him. Not like his mother or sister or girlfriend/wife. (The truly dangerous men are the ones for whom all women are “other”). So humanizing Ford means showing how really she isn’t so different from the ‘good’ women in your life much like how humanizing gay people was showing how they were like the ‘good’ people in your life.
Grace, I don’t really understand the idea that saying Ford shouldn’t go after Nolan’s job doesn’t leave her any legitimate responses. She can publicize how the comments pile on without identifying anyone in particular. She can publicize how Ford’s comments were crappy on her own page and reference him by name. All of those responses, and probably others involve her saying what it did to her, and if she wants identifying him in the same forum and same way as he identified her. That is all appropriate. What is wildly disproportionate is investigating his profile to find out who his employer is, searching his page for other links that you think portray him in a bad light and then publishing it with a two way link to his employers page. That is a step by step description of doxxing and it isn’t ok.
A lot of the focus in this thread appears to be on whether or not the appropriate measures will be enough to immediately scare slut shaming men enough to get them to stop. That isn’t how justice works. You don’t get to identify a harm and then decide that you can apply any amount of force necessary to get them to stop. Some amounts of force are out of proportion with the harm (see the Palestinian conflict for example). Aggregate harms are especially annoying because you need systemic answers (because the individual harms are often too small). When systemic answers are too slow, often times you get vigilantes. But unless there is a total break down of social order, vigilantes aren’t the answer.
[now that I’ve said it, I’m suddenly struck by how much the rhetoric in this discussion sounds like the “We have to hit them hard because all they understand is force and we need to send a strong message” discussions I have with certain friends on the topic of terrorism.
Sebastian H:
Which is not what she did. She saw the comment, clicked on the button which would take her to his profile, and saw, on the page that loaded, his employer and his “like” of two racist jokes. Then she wrote a message to the employer to ask if they were aware of it.
Which is not what she did. She saw the comment, clicked on the button which would take her to his profile, and saw, on the page that loaded, his employer and his “like” of two racist jokes. Then she wrote a message to the employer to ask if they were aware of it.
That is not doxxing. Doxxing is the publishing, publicly, of private information. Nolan put this information on his public Facebook page. Apparently, search Facebook for Nolan’s name and click on the resulting link, and this is the information you see, which he put there.
As to the humanizing of women, some further reflection: it interests me that apparently for gay people, bi people, and trans people, all it takes to humanize us is to meet us and get to know us and realize that we’re no more evil and predatory than the average cis straight person, but to humanize women apparently requires a further step, since it’s self-evident that every human being everywhere has met women and had the opportunity to get to know us and realize that we’re no more evil and predatory than the average man. What’s the difference, I wonder? Well, you provide an answer: to a significant minority of people, apparently women are further divided into madonnas and whores.
So now I guess women have to work on humanizing the whores. (Which, apparently, is most of us. I’m told that it includes me, because I’m trans, even though I’ve been monogamously married for over 25 years.)
Looks like getting to this level playing field is going to take a lot of work. I sure hope that the men split it with us, 50/50.
Grace
Regarding what Myca wrote, I’m instinctively more comfortable with telling someone’s spouse vs telling someone’s boss. Telling someone’s spouse or parents is essentially a “shaming” move. It’s not attacking their ability to earn a living. And, fundamentally, I think that bigots should be able to earn a living, but should also be ashamed.
I’m reminded a bit of when, in 2004, Margaret Cho was targeted for racist anti-fat misogynistic abuse, and published some of the letters she got – including the names of the senders.
That kind of public shaming seems entirely appropriate to me – even if it did hypothetically cause some of those people marital problems.
Grace, you’re linking to wikipedia so it may have changed since you looked at it, but the current link is exactly right and not what you are saying:
“Doxing (from dox, abbreviation of documents), or doxxing, is the Internet-based practice of researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual. The methods employed to acquire this information include searching publicly available databases and social media websites (like Facebook), hacking, and social engineering. It is closely related to internet vigilantism and hacktivism.
Doxing may be carried out for various reasons, including to aid law enforcement, business analysis, extortion, coercion, harassment, online shaming and vigilante justice.”
On the topic of humanizing I don’t think that is right. You humanize people by bringing people from stereotyped label into “human”. You are bringing them from “other” into “us”. So the move from gay to “us” is the same as the move from slut to “us”.
No, actually, Sebastien, it’s not. You’re still a man. You have privilege no woman can imagine, even as you dismiss this guy joining a hate mob against a woman, and tone troll her.
Men are ALWAYS human. Women still are not, and you have repeatedly ignored that, even though you have never lived it.
Sebastian H:
I read a little further.
If you put up a poster on a public kiosk with your name and employer on it, and an epithet and some racism, and someone tells your employer about it, you haven’t been doxxed.
Grace
It’s funny how these guys scream with rage…..at being hoist by their own petard.
They say horrible shit to women under their real names.
Then they scream it’s unjust that they be nailed for their actual, accurate words that they used against women. It’s a human rights violation that people link their vicious sexism to their freely-used real names.
What am I missing here?
Sebastian H:
It’s a nice theory. I don’t dislike it. But it doesn’t seem to match the data. Every living human being knows women, and should be able to reach the conclusion that we’re human.
Once upon a time, the vast majority of people in Western societies could say that they didn’t know a gay person. A majority still say they don’t know a trans person.
No one has ever been able to say they don’t know a woman. And yet, here we are.
Grace
Ginmar “What am I missing here?”
A sense of proportion.
But that’s what all oppressed peoples (at a group level) already do, right from the start. Try to prove how “good” we are, how “like you” we are, how respectable we are. We are raised with the instructions to be the “better person”, to mind how we express ourselves (so that we may be considered intelligent and rational), to work harder and achieve more (so that we may avoid the negative stereotype of “worthless “, “lazy”, or “stupid”). We follow intricate, unwritten rules for our physical appearance, gestures, tone and volume of voice, vocabulary choices, posture, mannerisms, etc. Sometimes these rules are contradictory, and we have to walk a fine line between the contradictions.
And it all meets with very little success. Until some “oomph!” is put behind it, in the form of mass movements: protests, boycotts, legislation. The “oomph!” is the power to inflict consequences upon one’s oppressor. Y’know, so that the power to influence behavior isn’t a one-way street. Oppressors get mad about pushback; they get mad when they aren’t the only ones with the power to influence behavior.
(I think it’s also worth mentioning that there is no “closet” for women—no place to cloak ourselves with a neutrality that could give us, inadvertently, the status of men until a moment in the future when we could reveal ourselves as women….not the dumb broads you thought we were, but Real People! Yes, more LGBT people coming out of the closet had an important impact on changing heterosexism, but it was not the only, or even the most important factor.)
To revisit the idea I mentioned earlier: that employers only take the positions they do on the restriction of their name, reputation, equipment, and company time by their employees because of the way clients, business associates, and other employees react to negative behavior. You don’t want employers “enforcing social norms”…okay…but the reason they are is to avoid the liability that would and does accrue to them if they do not.
Are the clients, business associates, and other employees enemies of free speech for ceasing to do business with employers who are associated with instances of racism and sexism? Follow closetpuritan’s link on comment #102. That study indicates that firing (or avoiding to hire) toxic employees present a cost savings over over twice what hiring a stellar employee (defined as someone whose work is in the top 1%) brings—-and the study only takes into account the cost of employee turnover caused by toxic employees, not the cost of litigation, regulatory penalties, or productivity drains.
So: Ford went in the front door and linked Nolan’s own words (made with a clear connection to his employer) with his employer. You’re against that. You believe that Ford should have gone in the back door and merely publicized his name with a link, so that an unofficial boycott (or perhaps even an official one) would have been the likely result. Is a boycott also out-of-bounds to you? I ask because boycotts and anti-discriminatory legislation have been continually derided as “anti-free-speech”, yet have so far proven to be effective means of changing behavior, whereby individual and group efforts at proving human worth and respectability haven’t. This is how oppressed people become not-so-oppressed people; by organizing and using our collective power.
One more thing: about all that respectable pantomime we perform?
You didn’t list any helpful behaviors or images that we, as women, could use in order to make ourselves appear human. Rather, you listed roles women can enter in order to make ourselves appear human. The two are not at all the same thing. What makes you think men who are otherwise misogynists respect the women in those roles, rather than the roles themselves?
I ask because I became a mother late in life (for my socioeconomic, cultural, and geographical background—32 instead of 22). My behavior and modes of expression did not change; I didn’t change any of the fine-line pantomime imagery I cobbled together just like every woman cobbles something together in an attempt to find that sweet-spot of acceptability or at least neutrality. But I was treated so much better in general once I became a mother…not just by men, but women too. And I’m an unwed mother! The role itself brought me a respectability I was denied before. Think about that, Sebastian.
……from the guy who has REPEATEDLY dismissed women, womens’ expert opinions, and downplayed everything we said to draw false equivalencies. Yeah, get a mirror. It’s clear you are incapable of listening to women.
“now that I’ve said it, I’m suddenly struck by how much the rhetoric in this discussion sounds like the “We have to hit them hard because all they understand is force and we need to send a strong message” discussions I have with certain friends on the topic of terrorism.”
Yeah, THERE’S proportion for you. Gangs of men threatening women? Gee, ladies, suck it up. Women fighting back? Terrorism.
While I agree with your points in general, La Lubu (as usual), it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t true for all LGBTQ people–some are sufficiently non-gender-conforming on one axis or another that they are not believed if they claim to be straight/cis. (Some cis and straight people are that nonconforming, too, to be fair. Nobody says all bigots are smart or nuanced.) They’re usually the worst-hit with whatever level of violence and abuse the rest of society thinks is acceptable.
But I think that supports your point more. Lots of people didn’t know gay people–but the ones they did, they denigrated. It wasn’t just straight people realizing they knew gay people, it was straight people realizing they knew gay people who weren’t the stereotypes they held of gay people. There’s a rising-tide effect for people who do fit the stereotype, but it has lagged.
Similarly, the madonna-whore thing isn’t just a problem because most women don’t fit into those stereotypes; it’s a problem because the ones who do deserve respect, too. To rephrase La Lubu, I think, pointing out roles women can fit that are respected points out ways for women to enter the “madonna” category, when actually it shouldn’t matter which category we’re in at all.
(None of this is to say that I think Ford took the best possible action here, or even a good one–while Grace assigned me roughly the right side of the debate above, if a friend had asked me about taking the action Ford took in response to the same provocation, I would have advised her against it. And as a couple of my earlier comments imply, I’m not being very coherent on that topic anyway. But if we’re discussing how we stop the comments in the first place–which I think is an important part of the discussion–I think the above points apply.)
Thank you, Harlequin. That was exactly what I meant to say.
Also, re: madonna/whore syndrome, it has been my experience and observation that those tropes have nothing to do with sexual activity, but rather performative femininity. Any woman who doesn’t perform femininity to the standards of a misogynist is going to be called a whore or slut regardless of whether not or she has ever engaged in sexual behavior.
Women who *do* perform femininity to the exacting standards of misogynists will find themselves hampered in many key areas of life. Gay men who perform masculinity to standards set by heterosexuals aren’t hampered in that same way. I literally would not be able to provide adequate food and shelter for myself if I had to obey the rules of proper womanhood set by men who have contempt for women.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe “force is all they understand” is a better argument than I thought.
“……from the guy who has REPEATEDLY dismissed women, womens’ expert opinions, and downplayed everything we said to draw false equivalencies. Yeah, get a mirror. It’s clear you are incapable of listening to women.”
That’s an interesting argument. I’ll take it as intended.
….because comparing to a murderous oppressive regime SURE is the feminist thing to do, isn’t it.
So, I was doing a bit of re-reading, as I sometimes do. Because, like Amp, I find these conversations useful for gaining new understanding and clarifying my thoughts.
A couple of observations, for which I need to don my moderator hat.
Sebastian H, your one-line response “A sense of proportion” comes across as a one-liner, a “burn”. That’s not the kind of conversation we’re working toward at Alas. You are free to make an argument (clearly, looking at this thread), but please develop any arguments so that they are clearly about the ideas and not the people.
Ginmar, I share your frustration when people don’t listen to, or seem to be casually discounting, the contributions of others, and I agree that there’s often a huge element of gender in it. That said, “It’s clear you are incapable of listening to women” is an attack on the person rather than the behavior or the argument. Please attack the behavior or the argument, and not the person, so that we can better have the conversation we’re working toward at Alas.
I’ve found this thread to be frustrating, but also worthwhile and interesting. Tweak your techniques, to help keep it more toward worthwhile and interesting for as many of the participants as we can. Thanks.
I doff my moderator hat.
Grace
My sense of the word “dox” matches Grace’s: It means publicizing private information, such as someone’s real name (if they keep it secret), or their home address.
When recently some folks were finding photos of me and reposting them to make fun of them, that wasn’t doxing. Because I posted the photos myself on my Hereville website; I myself had publicly associated the photos with my name and my work. It was objectionable for other reasons, but it wasn’t doxing.
From The Economist:
From Google:
search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.
From the New York Times:
Grace, there is a reason why I petitioned to delete that comment about 10 seconds after I posted it. It appeared to be gone for a few hours immediately afterwards but seems to be back. That is a question for whichever moderator reversed that (or whatever other mechanism the blog does, it may have been automatic for all I know). Now that we are talking about it there isn’t any point in getting rid of it, but I did try.
As for dox, it is private OR identifying information, and facebook is one of the very most classic places to get it. Exposing facebook stuff to an employer is one of the most classic ways to do it. Doxxing almost always involves compiling information from public sources and then using the compiled information in ways that go beyond the intended initial distribution. Ford got mad at Nolan, went on his facebook to research about him, found out who his employer was, compiled stuff she thought could create a shitstorm, publicized all of these things, and contacted his employer directly with what she had collected. That is absolutely classic doxxing. Now Nolan made it easy because he apparently had no idea how to use the facebook settings to make it hard, but that is doesn’t change how it works. You can argue that doxxing is ok in cases like these (which brings us back to the proportionality side) but the facebook-work doxxing is seriously one of the most typical ways doxxing plays out.
Yes, people nowadays should probably remove their jobs from their facebook. Did you think of that when you first signed up for facebook? Or did you realize the mistake later and change it because you heard of something nasty later? Tens of millions of people didn’t because they thought of facebook initially as something between friends. Facebook has gone through at least 5 major rounds of changing their policies on what information gets shown to whom, so it isn’t shocking at all that people who thought their information was semi-private get surprised later or that what they thought was background ‘link people you know up’ stuff gets used in other ways.
My real name is linked to this name in a number of ways that I can’t get rid of from about 8 years ago. That won’t ever go away. You could document it with completely public information quite easily. Finding people’s employer’s is also quite easy in most cases. You could do it with me easily. It would nevertheless be doxxing to compile my comments, find my employer and reveal them. That is true even if theoretically my employer could do all that.
Sebastian:
Grace, La Lubu, Ginmar and Harlequin (I don’t think I missed anybody) have said and said more than well pretty much what I was thinking when I asked you about “humanizing women.”
Reading their responses, though, has made me think about—and I am going to be very clumsy here—the connections between and among homophobia, transphobia and misogyny and how misogyny is, or at least so often functions as, an unacknowledged substrate of those other two hatreds. Why am I thinking about this? I’m not entirely sure, and maybe it’s a train of thought that won’t really pan out, except that it connects in my head to why the idea of “humanizing women” that you put forward set off red flags for me.
At first, I thought those red flags were simply a practical matter, i.e., what concrete steps could Ford or Nolan’s employer have reasonably taken to make women more human to Nolan, especially given that this all happened online? But reading the women who have responded to you has made me think the red flags actually go much deeper. There is a difference between what gay and trans people are other to and what women, as women (whether they are gay, straight or bi, cis or trans) are other to; and the idea that one can and should humanize women in the way that you argue one can and should humanize gay people seems to me to elide that difference in really harmful ways. I can’t right now articulate more than that, and I need to turn my attention to end-of-semester work. So I will probably be bowing out for another couple of days.
Sebastian H:
Sebastian, I did not know that you tried to delete it. I don’t know why it appeared again. Speculation: maybe it somehow ended up in the moderation queue and one of our many moderators approved it? Thanks for letting me know that you tried.
I did, actually. More than that, I signed up on Facebook under an alias and provided almost no information (this was before their publicized “real name” policy, and it scarcely matters, since I haven’t logged into Facebook in years).
Yup. That’s one of the major reasons I refuse to use it, and limit my use of all social media.
Grace
Richard:
It will pan out. I strongly recommend Excluded, by Julia Serano, to see why it pans out. An unfair summary: even among people who value men and women equally, people overwhelmingly and unconsciously value masculinity higher than femininity. So the denigration and fear of feminine things, or femmephobia, is comprehensive and widespread.
My own thought, just now off the cuff: is this a structural underpinning of the system, or a retreat position for our internalized prejudices? I don’t know. It may not matter.
Anyway, I think you would find it a thought-provoking read.
Grace
Grace, I believe it’s a structural underpinning of the system—else why would we have those internalized prejudices? Where would we learn them, especially when we ourselves are the target? Religions that value men and masculinity over women and femininity have a lot to answer for in this regard.
Nolan came at Ford via Facebook. There was no “research” on Ford’s part at all. She used the information which Nolan himself brought to her Facebook page.
It’s as if Nolan walked up to Ford in a restaurant, said “I’m Nolan, and my employer, Meriton, is sitting over there at that corner table….SLUT.” and Ford stood up and said “Meriton, your employee here just called me a slut!” And then everyone is shocked, SHOCKED that Ford could be so cruel.
@Kate, I agree completely.
My view on doxxing: there’s a lot of nuance to be had about how much hunting and pecking and compiling you have to do in order to qualify as doxxing someone, and I’ve been stumped about whether to call something doxxing or not in other situations, but not in this one. If you don’t even have to leave the website where a comment was made to find information about the commenter–if, in fact, all you have to do is glance at their public profile on that same website–it’s not doxxing.
I’m sure we all check the profiles of users we see commenting on the internet all the time, whether to check to see how long they’ve been a user there, out of curiosity about their other interests or commenting history, or to see if we’re gendering them correctly in our heads. There is absolutely nothing about looking at a commenter’s profile on the website where they’re commenting that constitutes doxxing in any of those cases, and unless someone can give me a good explanation otherwise, I think I’ll make that a personal rule going forward.
I’ve been internetting wrong? In my defense, I am old and lazy.
Yes, this. Exactly this.
Also, the main reason I brought up the ‘what if it was Nolan’s wife, rather than his employer’ point wasn’t about the morality of trying to get someone fired vs. trying to ruin their marriage – it’s about where the responsibility lies in the final determination. I think that very few people would be saying “I can’t believe Ford made Nolan’s wife leave him!” I think there would be a broad understanding that leaving was 100% his wife’s choice, was based on his actions, and that, actually, it’s better for her to know how her husband treats women!
The same logic applies here. Right or wrong, this is on Meriton.
Now, like Sebastian, I do think there ought to be broad protections against firing employees for their actions or behavior outside the job (one of the ways the analogy breaks down, of course), and there aren’t, and that sucks, but still, nobody was making Meriton fire him.
And Sebastian, you really ought to let go of the ‘doxxing’ terminology. This in no way matches what’s traditionally called doxxing, any more than noting the return address on an envelope is doxxing.
The other thing that strikes me, reading this discussion, is how many other options both Nolan and Meriton had to head this off.
Nolan, of course, could have chosen not be a racist misogynist fuck. Or, if being a racist, misogynist fuck was crucially important to him, he could have chosen not to wave the “I work for Meriton” flag on his facebook page. Not publicly naming your employer when you’re doing shit that might get you fired is a time-honored tradition. I don’t name my boss on my Fetlife page, frex.
Meriton could have disciplined Nolan, could have asked him to attend sensitivity classes, could have bawled him out and told him to get their name off his facebook … could have done plenty of things short of firing him that would still have addressed the central problem facing them.
But, as many others have pointed out, Ford doesn’t really have any other options to curtail her harassment – that is, no other options that would still have addressed the central problem facing her.
In this situation, to be asking the person with the fewest options, the attacked person, to not take one of the only options available to her when there are so many other options available to everyone else seems awfully silly.
—Myca
Grace:
Just a quick note to say thanks for the recommendation. I’ve put the book on my list—which, of course, means it is one among many (too many), but since I will likely be writing about this stuff, or at least stuff connected to this stuff, starting in the summer, I am likely to get to it sooner rather than later.
I think it needs to be stressed that Nolan saw a huge crowd of men threatening and verbally attacking Ford, got up, and joined in. That is an immense part of why it’s so offensive and horrifying that some people are focused on Ford’s response to this. Nolan apparently thought nothing of it. It reminds me of when one writer was discussing—resentfully—getting a speeding ticket on the side of the road while other speeders zipped past. Everyone else was getting away with it, so he felt angry that he had gotten busted. What seems to ho through a lot of these discussions is utter indifference to what women go through, in part because this behavior by men is perceived to be so common, so normal, that it’s a waste of time to get upset over it. As one guy said, in a book I read about sexual harassment, “Well, then, if you want to make it illegal, then you’d have to put all men in jail.” It strikes me as an almost triumphant thing to say, and in view of the way these guys eagerly pile on women, I can see why. They know the chances are good they’ll never get busted.
When guys argue that it’s futile to demand men change—-does this show up in any other case but where men are abusing women?—it almost seems like they want to make sure the “right” to abuse women is preserved even if they aren’t taking advantage of it themselves.
“When guys argue that it’s futile to demand men change—-does this show up in any other case but where men are abusing women?—it almost seems like they want to make sure the “right” to abuse women is preserved even if they aren’t taking advantage of it themselves.”
Who said it was futile to demand change? Can you point to a single comment on this thread by anyone who says that?
I’m saying that there are proportional ways to demand change, and that stripping a man of his job in this kind of instance isn’t one of them. Demanding anti-proportional responses to things causes enormous pushback by larger groups of people than proportional responses.
Again, I don’t understand how people think this extreme ostracism thing is supposed to work when you realize that it is horribly counterproductive in all sorts of other circumstances. The “force is all THOSE people understand argument” is generally understood to be really bad under almost any circumstance where you want to effect large social change. I don’t understand the argument where this is the time it supposed to be good.
“Ford doesn’t really have any other options to curtail her harassment – that is, no other options that would still have addressed the central problem facing her.”
That isn’t true at all. She can much more effectively deal with the harassment on facebook than she could in physcial space–she can block her harassers and they immediately can’t comment again. Now a truly dedicated troll could get around that, just like a truly dedicated investigator could find out where Nolan worked even if he didn’t have it on facebook. But then she could report him as actually stalking and stronger measures would be proportional.
The whole problem is that even very bad social situations which definitely need correction don’t make it just to over punish the lesser actors in the situation. When you do so, that is an injustice. We can see that in all sorts of situations. The Israel/Palestine conflict is a great example where both sides over punish the wrong people for being associated with the people that they are really mad at. Just because suicide bombers are an actual problem doesn’t make it justice for you to gun down the kid who throws a rock at an Israeli tank.
You should note that the way those on this thread have been parsing things, the above would be a defense of suicide bombing. Or saying that there were no steps to be taken against suicide bombing. But actually I’m arguing against disproportionate responses to suicide bombing. No one should have to spend lots of time worrying about suicide bombers may threaten their market experience in Israel. That is a real problem. But identifying a real problem doesn’t justify all responses to it.
Sebastian H:
I think that you’re generally correct when talking about how organized movements can best respond/demand change. But we’re talking about a single person responding in this case and that’s very different.
I don’t have my thoughts on this well organized, but I think that there’s something to it. (In addition to what others have said about the problem of humanizing women vs humanizing gays & lesbians)
The group/individual distinction is more complicated then we are giving credit for here. The implications cut all sorts of ways (both for and against my side of the discussion).
In this discussion we have been treating Nolan as only a group member. He isn’t an individual who said ‘slut’ he is a part of a ‘mob’ in which the weight of all threats against Ford are a part. He is a bit player in a group activity.
Ford is an individual, not part of any group (like for example the press) forced to deal with Nolan’s group. She used her contacts as developed through the press to try to bring lots of individual (not group right?) pressure on a hotel chain (is that an individual or group?) to fire Nolan (as an individual but because he was a lesser member of a scary group). That is an individual act, not leading or inspiring a group act.
Well, again, Nolan getting fired wasn’t the most obvious response to Ford’s comments, and I think most people reading it wouldn’t have assumed that that was the only acceptable solution to her. It was a possible outcome, and I think she should have borne it in mind if she didn’t; but it wasn’t Ford who “stripped [him] of his job.” I think you’re making an error if you judge Ford as if she intended that. (You can, obviously, still hold her partially responsible because it was a possible outcome. But if your claim is “you shouldn’t call for the jobs of men who make misogynistic comments”–hey, nobody did! Great, we’re all on the same page.)
Ostracism doesn’t work. Shame, sometimes, does.
I can’t speak for the whole community here, but for me…I’m not making the claim that it’s fine to punish whoever you can get to for the sins of the whole community. I’m making the claim that Ford’s particular action (that is, pointing out that Nolan made certain comments while clearly identifying himself with his employer, without calling for specific responses) was not so disproportionate that we should declare it always out of bounds for the particular level of misbehavior that Nolan, in particular, displayed. The firing was IMO quite disproportionate, as we’ve covered well here, but again, that’s not all on Ford’s head.
(If it was common that all it took to get someone fired was pointing out to their employer that they’d made a couple of racist & misogynistic comments, my calculation of Ford’s culpability would be different. But that is not common, even when the comments are made to the faces of the employee’s fellows, or even for more severe misbehavior. So I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume Ford intended to get him fired when she alerted his employer to the comments–I would have expected the more usual “get him banned from public communication while identified with the company, receive some sort of public statement about ‘training'” response. And, again, here, there’s a difference between responsibility and intent, which I think you’re significantly eliding in your comments, in addition to placing more of the responsibility on Ford than she deserves.)
Actually, a bit of clarification there, as what I just said sounds kind of contradictory I think:
1. I think it was a bad idea to contact Nolan’s employer, and I would recommend against it for future people who have that idea. But I don’t agree with you on exactly how severe it was.
2. I think understanding the response requires acknowledgement of the larger mob, but I don’t think the response to Nolan requires thinking she’s punishing him instead of people who hurt her more, just that at some point if a mob isn’t responding to exactly equivalent responses, you start to make escalating responses instead. If she was able to make escalating responses to people who made worse comments to her, I don’t think that would have lessened her response to Nolan.
“pointing out that Nolan made certain comments while clearly identifying himself with his employer”
I disagree with this framing. This feels like a weird rehash of the morals clauses issue of the 1930s and 40s which let Christian fundamentalists act to fire or get fired people who had sex outside of marriage because their outside behavior “reflected on the business”. Feminists and unions successfully fought against that, under the idea that just because you can find out where someone works doesn’t mean that all their outside behavior “reflects on the business” such that you can fire them. Nolan wasn’t representing Meriton Apartments, nor did he claim to. This isn’t how facebook works. He didn’t leave a comment that said “Mr. Nolan a site supervisor at Meriton Apartments: Slut”. Whenever he signed up for Facebook it said something like “To help people find you more easily, where do you work?” and he foolishly answered. The fact that you can look on his “about” and figure out where he works doesn’t mean that everything he does outside of work is him as a representative of Meriton Apartments. That is a deeply corporatist framing which we should strongly resist.
“And, again, here, there’s a difference between responsibility and intent, which I think you’re significantly eliding in your comments, in addition to placing more of the responsibility on Ford than she deserves.”
I’m not eliding it, but I think we may be disagreeing about her intent. I think she was trying to get him fired. You seem to think she was trying for something else. If she had looked up his employer and linked just what had happened to her, your interpretation would make more sense to me. But a journalist looked up his employer, looked up at least two months of his posts, culled the two she wanted to highlight, cropped them all together, and made a post directed at her 3rd party readers specifically tying Meriton Apartments and Nolan together.
She opened with “I wonder if the folks over at Meriton Apartments are aware that a man listing himself as a supervisor for their business likes to leave comments on women’s facebook pages calling them sluts. I wonder if they are also aware that he is a racist.” She ended with “There are basically no consequences for men who behave like this, so we have to start making consequences for them.” She then tagged Meriton Apartments (which for default settings means that her post automatically shows up on their facebook page, though you can set it so that they have to authorize it first). Note the group dynamics by the way, she is trying to whip up an internet mob and she is the first person to link his comments to his employer–he never did so. As a columnist she also has much more of a readership to try to whip up the reaction she wants.
That looks to me like someone trying to get him fired. Her post-firing comments do nothing to dissuade that impression.
“I think it was a bad idea to contact Nolan’s employer, and I would recommend against it for future people who have that idea. But I don’t agree with you on exactly how severe it was.”
I think contacting his employer would have been bad. She went well beyond that. She is a columnist who linked him and his employer, researched two months of further comments having nothing to do with his comment to her, linked his employer with all of those comments in a public statement inviting her readers to take action AND then notified his employer of the post after she had already published it. That isn’t the same as notifying his employer that he made a rude comment (which I still think would be inappropriate).
So here’s a thing. A man threatened to murder me on the subway the other day, which sadly is pretty common for me. But wait! Before he messed with me he was messing with some other people on the train. They were brown. Evidently he is a racist in addition to being transphobic. Big surprise. But these people — who I totally don’t know — got his picture. They posted it on their Facebook account, along with the account of his angry, racist harassment.
Keep in mind, this man literally threatened to cut my throat. I have no idea what he said to these other people. It was hard to hear. But people who were closer to the action were clearly uncomfortable.
His picture is out there. On Facebook, it is a public post. It’s starting to go kinda viral. When this happens, from time to time, we find out who the person is.
If we find out who he is, this man who THREATENED TO MURDER ME, who harasses brown people for no reason but they are brown, what should we do?
If someone tells his boss, his friends, his family, if he pays some cost, has not justice been served?
Free speech, but who actually gets to have free speech? Can I shout his name?
Veronica, I was physically chased down the street in the 90s by 5 fag bashers on a weekend where two gay men had been put in the hospital, probably by them.
The whole concept of proportional is that you respond differently to different behavior. So I’m not at all sure what you’re trying to say about the proper reaction to facebook comments.
Are you suggesting that because the guy who physically threatened you and Nolan are both men, that Nolan got what he deserved?
Here is a similar story with a better employer response
Essentially a young woman expressed anger against Jews based on their alleged disinterest in poor people in the US and their oppression of Palestinians in Israel. She frankly comes off as anti-Semitic. A facebook storm tries to get her fired and the UCLA Medical Center says that the comments don’t reflect them, but that they don’t police employee’s statements when not made on behalf of the university. That is precisely the norm we should be supporting. (And by the way I disagree with just about everything that student wrote about Jews).
But if veronica d exercises the right of free speech by publicizing the name of this bully, it’s highly likely that his employer would get rid of him—they wouldn’t want to risk the loss of business or expenses related to workplace incidents of the same nature (again, racism and sexism are not part-time avocations; the people indulging in that type of expression off the job are doing it on-the-job too….just not usually around anyone with the authority to put an end to it, so the other workers are left in the limbo of “hearsay” if they make a complaint).
So, I’ll ask again: since the only reason employers are firing people for this kind of thing (actually, usually layoffs—few employers are denying unemployment benefits) is to avoid the known loss of business that will occur from silent boycotts, are those who engage in silent boycotts (i.e., people who avoid doing business with entities where racist, sexist, other -ist incidents have been publicized) enemies of free speech? Since we are contributing to a climate where racist, sexist, or other -ist speech is stifled in the public realm?
Loss of a job is a big deal. But so is loss of business, which means many, many more people lose their jobs, even though they weren’t party to the incident(s) that caused the loss of business. I’m also under the impression that you’re making a “don’t sweat the small stuff” argument, with anything short of physical assault defined as “small stuff”.
If you’re reading a Facebook page and you’re logged in (not sure about logged out), and you hover your mouse pointer over anybody’s name, it shows you a popup box with a couple of pieces of information about them. It took me 5 comments on a post about a New York Times article to find one that showed me the person’s workplace and position (2, if you count “retired” as a job; also, the third comment showed me the name of the person’s spouse). You don’t even have to click on their profile to get it.
So, yeah. He did leave a comment like that, whether he meant to or not.
(This is a pretty common feature of Internet commenting, of course. If you hover over my gravatar you’ll see my profile blurb from a pretty terrible science blog I made in grad school and then only ever posted like two posts on. But there it is, forever linked to this rather dubious Internet identity through the email address!)
As Amp stated in the initial post, Ford has posted stuff like this before; for example, she got some students suspended for a few days. I expect that she thought there would be consequences. That doesn’t mean she thought he’d be fired, as that is only one of many possible consequences.
That part is an edit from after she received pushback in comments for the post; the original post was just the first paragraph. I don’t know when the edits were done. The bit about consequences may or may not have been there when Meriton first saw the post.
Um, what the hell. How could you read Veronica’s comment and decide the important relationship about these two situations was the person’s gender?
Seconded. That seems like an extraordinary leap.
What commonality was I supposed to realize from that Harlequin?
Harassment, Sebastian. If nothing else, the inclusion of race-based harassment should have been a clue.
Well that clue isn’t very helpful. Here are the things I didn’t think Veronica meant. Maybe I rejected one of them too soon.
I didn’t think she raised it to suggest that threatening to kill someone when you are trapped with them in a subway car should be punished in the same proportion as calling someone a slut in a facebook comment.
I didn’t think she raised it to suggest that all racist people should be fired from their jobs because they might want to threaten to kill trans people.
I didn’t think she raised it to suggest that posting the picture of someone who is harassing you in person is the same as contacting an internet commentor’s job.
I understand that the mob metaphor for internet harassment is evocative, but it isn’t meant to be a one to one correspondence with an actual lynch mob actually dragging you to a tree and hanging you is it? It is an evocative metaphor designed to show similarities, not meant to suggest that it is actually identical in every way.
I don’t know exactly what Veronica intended with that comment, as I am (alas) not psychic. But I read it and I saw:
– Racist and sexist harassment from both Nolan and the guy on the train (as Mandolin said).
– Publicization of the person’s image, perhaps leading to the ability to contact his employer or personal connections.
– Questions about what kind of consequences for him are appropriate here. Note that this doesn’t mean she thinks the same consequences are appropriate for Nolan.
When I read it, I interpreted it to be giving an example of an obviously more extreme case of harassment, to help delineate the continuum of responses we make to behavior like that, without making a 1:1 analogy with this case. But if you’re unclear on what she meant–if none of the possible conclusions you came up with seemed sensible to you–you always have the option of asking her to clarify, rather than jumping directly to “animus against men” as the most plausible option.
Especially since it’s in no way grounded in the text.
I’m not reading veronica d’s mind either, but I took the comment to mean that since the man who threatened to kill her, and said who knows what else to the other couple (in the same angry tone of voice and gestures; we can assume it was also threatening) is currently having his angry racist rant publicized on the internet, there may be repercussions in this man’s life that he did not intend. Loss of a job could be one of them. The question raised by this is: if this man loses his job because his employer feels he is too much of a liability (or is unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt on if or when he may act out physically what he has threatened verbally), is it the couple who is responsible (by posting it in the first place)? Or perhaps it is the man himself who bears responsibility?
Sebastian, I’m really getting the impression that you think there should be: (1) a well-defined border as to when abuse should be taken seriously enough for actual consequences to be invoked against an abuser, (2) a clear line of authority as to whom should be setting and invoking said consequences, and (3) a detailed, well-delineated line as to what abuse warrants what consequences. In other words, that you want to have a conversation about boundaries.
What many other people on this thread, including myself, have been trying to tell you is: (1) we like boundaries too, but (2) we don’t often have our boundaries respected by those who imagine themselves as higher on the social hierarchy, and (3) part of the socialization of men in many cultures is to push on or completely ignore women’s boundaries, that (4) women and others generally seen as lower on the hierarchical scale don’t have the authority to set social boundaries, thus theirs (ours) are not to be respected—only the boundaries others care to set for us are to be respected, hence (5) sometimes, the folks experiencing this negation of their own human right to set boundaries have to take more forceful measures, because their simply saying “no, this is not acceptable” is not getting the job done.
That is the context on boundaries that cannot be ignored if there is to be any understanding, let alone consensus, on this issue.
Sebastian, you have repeatedly invoked the potential for abuse of shunning as a reason why it should never be used as a tactic to improve social relations. Or am I reading too much in to your comments? Perhaps you think shunning can be ethically used as a tactic, but not for “just” verbal abuse? You tell me. I’m not asking the question about silent boycotts rhetorically; I would really like an answer (and not just from you, from anyone). Are people who engage in silent boycotting acting unethically? And the corollary: exactly how much/what type of racist or sexist expression should be considered actionable, vs. tolerable? (minding the fact that targets of said attitudes aren’t as prosaic about what ought to be tolerable.)
In your comparisons, the consideration of “are there issues upon which reasonable people can disagree, and are there issues upon which reasonable people cannot disagree” is being overlooked. I reject the argument that when I avoid doing business with racist, sexist assholes that I am acting unethically; that there is no moral difference between say, avoiding neo-Nazis and avoiding Jewish people (or black people, or LGBT people, or any other group of people who have been and are discriminated against). When you reject the right of oppressed people to be able to shun or boycott those who oppress them, you’re rejecting a major way in which oppressed people become less oppressed.
Today on the Internet:
Woman: A violent man threatened to murder me.
Man: What! Do you hate men?
Honestly, this doesn’t deserve a response (other than to say it doesn’t deserve a response).
Sebastian, dude, something is seriously wrong with you.
“Sebastian, dude, something is seriously wrong with you.”
Nice.
If I said “Veronica, honey, I think you’re [any end to the sentence is irrelevant after the diminutive, maybe throwing in ‘hysterical’ would be extra polite]” would that have been appropriate?
But since you’re here, what was the point of your anecdote in the subway in relation to the discussion?
La Lubu: “Sebastian, you have repeatedly invoked the potential for abuse of shunning as a reason why it should never be used as a tactic to improve social relations. ”
What is this ‘never’? I believe in proportional responses. I’m not particularly sure how many times I have to say it. If you believe in differently proportional responses we can talk about it. But you seem to justify almost unlimited responses, which not only is grossly unjust, but is also counterproductive.
I don’t believe it is just to judge a business by the fact that it employees low level people who may or may not say nasty things in their private life. (There may be exceptions for certain high level people or in certain trust-important positions). I believe trying to deny someone the ability to earn a living based on their outside legal behavior is an actively evil thing to do. It makes you absolutely just like a fundamentalist Christian who wants to deny ‘sluts’ the ability to work based on their moral appraisal of the slut’s outside behavior. You shouldn’t want companies to police their employee’s outside legal behavior. People make preference choices all the time. If you overhear something you don’t like and choose to punish his employer for it, you are well within your rights. If you try to get him fired you are being vindictive and acting out of proportion.
Pluralistic societies have to deal with differences of moral values and differences in opinions. The fundamentalist approach is to try to enforce their values on everyone all the time. Trying to deny someone the ability to get a living unless they conform to your moral code is not the way a pluralistic society works, and playing into fundamentalist norms is playing the game in ways that will only cause minorities to lose. This is a classic “win the battle, lose the war” kind of situation. I obviously can’t stop you from doing counterproductive and evil things. But just because you have suffered oppression doesn’t give you unlimited license.
@sebastian — Others here have summed up my meaning well enough. If they have the sense of understand me, you can exercise same. Or not. Whatever. You’re a toxic energy suck and worth no one’s time.
Sebastian: “I obviously can’t stop you from doing counterproductive and evil things.”
Veronica: “You’re a toxic energy suck and worth no one’s time.”
Part of the purpose of the moderating rules is to keep this blog a space where I’m able to function. I think that anger can be completely legitimate, but that it can be legitimate doesn’t change that if there’s too much of it on “Alas” I’d have to leave “Alas,” which is a problem because I’m the main person running “Alas.”
In short:
Please dial it down several notches. Thank you.
Sebastion H:
It’s victimhood culture:
It seems be something like a reverse ad hominem. She has been a bigger victim than you, therefore she has more moral authority than you and her moral arguments are more correct than yours.
Desipis:
Veronica has already said “Others here have summed up my meaning well enough,” referring (I assume) to the recent comments on that subject by La Lubu and Harlequin.
The interpretation you offered is 1) a strawman,
2) ignores what La Lubu and Harlequin wrote about how to interpret that comment, which would be defensible if Veronica hadn’t already said that those interpretations were on-target, meaning that you were in effect ignoring what Veronica said Veronica meant, instead substituting your own meaning, and
3) was obviously insulting.
It also isn’t lost on me that you chose to do this immediately following my attempt to moderate and de-escalate this thread. Rather than try to contribute to de-escalating, you did what you could to escalate.
Please don’t post in this thread again.
Well, this leads me to believe that you agree that Meriton acted properly in firing Nolan, because (a) he was a supervisor, and (b) as such had access to the keys to private living quarters of Meriton clients. He fits the exceptions you just listed.
But I’m really glad you brought up trust, because I asked earlier where trust and social cohesion fit into this scenario. You and I have apparently had very different life experiences; I have never encountered a person who was racist or sexist in their “outside legal behavior” that wasn’t also free and casual with their racist and sexist behavior on-the-job, albeit usually away from supervisory personnel. I really applaud the use of new technology to capture these moments—-it’s a real game changer!—because now, instead of complaints being dismissed as “one person’s word against another” (with the person on the lower-end of the hierarchical scale labeled as anything from ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too serious’—because “just kidding!! ha ha!” is supposed to be an adequate defense against verbal abuse—to some version of being a denizen of desipis’ “victimhood culture”)…there is actual hard-core evidence. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you are a person of upper-middle class employment status, yes? If so, you are frankly more sheltered than the average person from having the unwritten expectation of having to tolerate a certain amount of racist, sexist shit as part of your job duties. And actually, as part of your business associate experience and certainly individual customer experience. Quit trying to paint this as “bullying bourgeoisie being mean to the proles”, when in reality working class people like myself benefit even more from workplaces that fire and/or avoid hiring toxic employees.
I’m really glad you brought up trust, because what I’ve been trying, repeatedly, to express (and apparently failing) is that Nolan’s firing, and similar firings, are not a matter of employers defending a certain ideology—they’re a matter of trust. Let me be blunt here: I don’t trust racists and sexists. I don’t mean the academic version, in which all people raised in a racist, sexist society develop unconscious biases and internalized prejudices; I mean active, conscious, out-loud-and-proud racists and sexists; the kind that use slurs, tell unfunny jokes, rant and rave about the people they view as lesser beings.
I don’t trust racist, sexist people to treat me fairly. Because they never have. I don’t give a shit about academic notions of their “free speech”. Free speech doesn’t mean “entitled to have that speech viewed as separate from who they are as a person.” Let me assure you, bigots do not separate their bigotry from how they actively treat the targets of their bigotry on-the-job, be they customers, clients, or fellow employees. I expect such persons to attempt to defraud, disrespect, and otherwise do harm to me. I reject the notion that I have to wait until I suffer severe bodily harm before I have a legitimate complaint.
I find it interesting that you keep bringing up the past practice of policing women’s sexual behavior off the job, when myself and other women have tried to tell you that the epithet “slut” has far more to do with notions of femininity than sex—that “slut” can be a sexual virgin whose opinions and self-advocacy are ‘too strong’ in the eyes of some misogynist. Now, the actual reason the policing of women’s off-the-job sexual behavior has fallen out of favor has to do with the political and economic strength of women; we have legal rights we did not previously possess, and now have the individual and collective strength to create consequences for businesses that attempt to say, fire a woman for being a unwed mother. The great increase in our political rights over the past one-hundred years has increased our social status. Our self-advocacy has changed minds, and the cumulative effect over the years has changed the general views of what is and is not appropriate behavior. For example:
It is in my lifetime that a pat on the ass on-the-job went from being viewed as a harmless act, certainly something no one but the overly sensitive would complain about, and ABSOLUTELY not something that someone should lose a job over! to being viewed through the eyes of the person experiencing it—-a degrading act of assault, a violation serious enough to warrant summary dismissal. Perhaps you don’t see that as a good thing. I do. I appreciate being able to go to work with the expectation of a molestation-free workplace.
It’s not ideology. It’s self-protection. Self-preservation. You see it as “Ford was trying to get him fired”. Well, maybe. Maybe she was trying to get him disciplined or demoted. She was definitely trying to publicize his actions in a way that would cause a silent boycott. But—why do you think such boycotts spontaneously happen when incidents like these get publicized? Don’t you realize it has something to do with harm-avoidance? Why rent from a company that has a guy with anger issues against women as the super, when you can rent elsewhere? Or why shop at a store where you’ll be followed around like a criminal, only to have the store manager (or sales clerk, or store security) still ask to search your purse or bag…when you can shop elsewhere and be treated with respect? Why get your car repaired at a place where women are regularly overcharged and cheated on “repairs” that don’t need to be made, when you can go elsewhere are be treated fairly instead of defrauded?
I’ll say it again: bigots cannot be trusted to treat the targets of their bigotry fairly or respectfully. They do not separate their attitudes from the targets of their attitudes. They don’t engage in the academic exercise of “do they really mean, and act on, what they say”? They do mean it. They do act on it. I not only reject, but resent the idea that my act of self-protection in avoiding these assholes is on a moral par with fundamentalists who actively seek to harm others.
For clarity’s sake: A (female) friend of mine takes her car in to an auto shop, and (male) mechanic “A” gives her a long laundry list of expensive parts that need to be replaced in order for her vehicle to be road-worthy. She is suspicious, and takes her car elsewhere for a second opinion only to discover that she doesn’t need the majority of the replacements the first mechanic recommended, that there is nothing wrong with most of the parts he identified as being close to failure and possibly dangerous. The second mechanic takes her out to her vehicle and shows her the parts (or shows her photos of the parts; different shops have different insurance requirements regarding customers in the auto bays) that actually need repair, vs. the normal parts previously identified as near-failure. Her estimated bill at the second shop is a fraction of the cost of the first shop’s estimate.
So, she has the repairs done at the second shop, makes a complaint to the Better Business Bureau about the first shop, and makes a formal complaint to the first shop about the mechanic who gave her the fraudulent estimate.
Is that “counterproductive and evil”? Remember, she caught the attempted fraud before it happened; no “harm” was done, other than the waste of her time.
Would it be “counterproductive and evil” for her to tell this story on Facebook, to all her (mostly local) Facebook friends, so they could avoid her experience? What if one of those friends does an image search of the mechanic who attempted the fraud (from the first shop’s website), and finds him on various websites (via gravatar) saying vile shit about women—and reposts screenshots of the man’s own words, to back up her argument that my friend’s experience probably wasn’t a coincidence, and that avoiding that shop is prudent for women? Is my friend “counterproductive and evil” for being responsible for the original posting? Or only her Facebook friend, for doing the image search and reposting?
Exactly what makes an act “counterproductive and evil”? How much damage has to occur before one escapes being called “counterproductive and evil”? Where does the “evil” begin?
Am I wrong in interpreting your comment to mean that persons who engage in silent boycotts against businesses where there is evidence that we would not be treated fairly or respectfully “counterproductive and evil” for doing so?
Are sexual harassment laws “counterproductive and evil” because they often result in a zero-tolerance policy, with “up to and including termination” as standard boilerplate language? (historically, that was the argument against sexual harassment laws, that “sexual harassment” is vague and undefinable, and the loss of a job far too serious of a consequence for something as harmless as name-calling, frottage, or fondling.)
@La Lubu:
Sebastian H’s standard for being “counterproductive and evil” really raises far more questions than it answers, including questions like, “Is it counterproductive and evil for me to say that nobody should go see Baby Geniuses 2 because it’s a terrible, terrible movie?”
Still, most of the questions flow out of a hypothetical situation like this one: Bob is one of a small number of employees at Alice’s Restaurant. He is also a neo-Nazi, but he keeps quiet about his politics at work. One day, however, he marches in a neo-Nazi parade, wearing a swastika tee and sieg-heiling the whole way.
1. A photographer for the local paper is there, and takes a photograph of Bob marching in the parade. Is it wrong to publish the photograph because there might be negative social consequences for Bob if people see that he’s a Nazi, including loss of employment?
2. Carol, who regularly eats lunch at Alice’s Restaurant, sees Bob marching in the parade. Carol doesn’t want to be around a neo-Nazi when she eats lunch. Is Carol morally obligated to continue eating her lunch at Alice’s, no matter how uncomfortable Bob makes her?
3. After Carol stops eating lunch at Alice’s Restaurant, Alice decides to find out why one of her best customers stopped coming to eat lunch there. Is it counterproductive and evil for Carol to tell Alice the truth?
4. Dave is the star employee at Alice’s Restaurant. When he finds out that Bob is a neo-Nazi, he decides that he is too uncomfortable working around a neo-Nazi to stay in his job, and finds employment elsewhere, even though leaving may have significant negative consequences for Alice’s business. Is he doing something evil by changing jobs to avoid Bob?
5. Alice, when she finds out Dave is leaving, asks him why. Is he morally obligated to remain silent to shield Bob from the negative social consequences of being a Nazi?
6. Upon learning that Bob is a Nazi, and that his Nazism has cost her her best employee and one of her best customers, is she doing something evil by terminating his employment?
Note, here, that Bob has done nothing to Alice, Carol or Dave, so it’s hard to see how any sense of “proportional response” could rescue them. However, by the standards laid out, all of them are evidently obligated to make considerable sacrifices in terms of personal comfort and even their livelihoods in order to insulate Bob from the consequences of his reprehensible speech, and are barred from doing so much as complaining truthfully about it.
How this is consistent with any reasonable standard of justice or interest in free exchange of ideas is beyond me, and I can’t see any way to defend Alice, Carol and Dave while condemning Ms Nolan without splitting some incredibly fine hairs.
It amazes me, the way men will defend the misdeeds of other men. They might seem to vocally condemn those deeds — but we see through them. Their claims are lip-service, because when the chips are down, they will invariably defend the interests of the man and attack the women who stepped forward.
This has happened on this very thread, where I shared an anecdote, something that I experienced, which might be compared and contrasted with the topic of this thread, and was thus attacked, and accused of being “anti male” (and worse).
This post has been making the rounds on Tumblr. I think it nicely sums up much of what I feel on that topic:
http://barrydeutsch.tumblr.com/post/135098670729/veronicastraszh-clementinevonradics-from
But why can I not speak of my experience without myself coming under the lens, from other men, unrelated to the issue, who are probably unaware of their own manifest sexism?
Because power hides itself, and so much of modern bigotry takes hold in the unconscious mind, for example, those little nudges of discomfort that people feel when women speak out, but that do not feel the same when men speak out.
You have to work to uncover this stuff in yourself. Few are willing to do that work. It’s so much easier to attack the woman.
And men do this again and again and again and again and again — and we’re kind of fucking pissed about it.
And this is why I called Sebastian a “toxic energy suck.” It wasn’t merely to insult him, which I could rightly call him an “asshole” or a “jackass.” But what point would that serve, even if true? That misses the point. In fact, he is a petty distraction, the sort of man that women have to learn to get past if we want to speak loudly about what we experience.
And when we gain the strength to ignore such men, well then another batch of men will join the fray. They would do everything they possibly can to destroy the woman. Everything. This happens again and again and again, far more often than any Nolan-type-jerk gets his.
(And yes, #notallmen and #somewomentoo, but if you ignore the gendered nature of this then you’re missing what is really going on.)
So this Nolan got fired. Too bad. Many people far more deserving get fired every day. Many people far more deserving get hurt in other ways every day. Many of those hurts come from men exactly like Nolan. At least a small part came from Nolan itself. Yet at least two men on this forum, faced with these facts, can find profound levels of energy to defend Mr. Nolan, and nothing but condemnation for the women who will stand up to him.
So many women stay silent, because they know if they speak up, not only are the Nolans of the world there to hurt them, but the Sebastians will join the fray.
Assholes.
Veronica, you aren’t wrong. I think the response to you was particularly appalling (though illustrative). And surely it’s true that sexism is in part intended as energy suck. I’m not sure if you’re protesting the moderation or just using this situation as a way to expand on your points. If the former, yes civility can disguise bigotry, and tone isn’t everything, and you aren’t wrong, but Barry does have personal boundaries–which often settle uneasily with mine. If you want to discuss it with me, him, Grace or whoever, maybe we can do it in an open thread. If the latter, yes, you remain correct. I apologize if I am misreading you in any way.
pillsy @263, that’s a good list of questions. I don’t think any of those people should have gone out of their way to protect Bob from the consequences of his own actions, nor do I think it’s their fault if Bob gets fired.
Granted, marching in a Nazi rally is probably calling more attention to yourself than calling one woman a slut on Facebook. On the other hand, if you list your employer on your Facebook page, then everything you say publicly on Facebook, you’re basically saying it in public, while wearing your uniform or company polo. So I think the comparison works.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people (women, specifically) to put up with harassment and insults without so much as saying “He called me a slut,” because it might affect the man’s livelihood. If calling her a slut affected his livelihood, maybe he shouldn’t have called her a slut.
I also don’t think that an honest report of someone’s actions (again, on a medium where they’ve chosen to publicly link themselves to their employer) necessarily constitutes maliciously “trying to get someone fired.” I think adding in the racist comments he made was probably out of line, since they weren’t directed at her, but that’s the only real criticism I have of her actions. She didn’t exaggerate, she didn’t demand that he be fired.
He chose to publicly harass her, in a way that announced his full name and his employer’s name. She truthfully reported his actions to his employer, and they chose to fire him. Based on his supervisory position and his access to customers’ rooms, that wasn’t necessarily a bad decision.
While I don’t think people should be fired for political affiliation or opinions, I also think listing your employer on Facebook brings their name into it and involves them more than they would be otherwise. If Nolan hadn’t had his employer listed, and Ford had to do a bunch of googling to even figure out that he worked for Meriton, then I think the argument that informing his employer was out of line would have merit.
pillsy: Exactly. That’s why I brought up the difference between issues on which reasonable people can disagree, and upon which reasonable people cannot disagree. I think reasonable people can disagree on a wide variety of issues, even when I believe quite strongly that the other side is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% wrong, even wrong in a way that causes or would potentially cause harm to others. Issues like abortion, nuclear power, gun control, the role and practice of religion in society, that sort of thing. I don’t think reasonable people can disagree about whether or not a neo-Nazi can be trusted by people who do not fit his or her Aryan ideal.
It seems as if Sebastian is arguing that verbal red flags are not an indicator of nonverbal overt behavior, and frankly I consider that ludicrous. That if someone tells a racist “joke” or uses racial slurs, that we shouldn’t assume that person treats people of color differently than he or she treats white people. That if a man uses misogynist slurs, engages in internet pile-ons against women, and “likes” comments referencing the oral rape of women, that we shouldn’t assume he does this in physical space in his dealings with women.
It also seems (taken to its logical conclusion) that Sebastian is arguing that the expression of political opinions in the public sphere is diminished by the social stigma against racist and sexist language—that “our” ability to have discussion on race (and/or sex) will be incomplete unless people not only feel free to use racist (and/or sexist) slurs and perpetuate racist (and/or sexist) stereotypes, but also not be judged or treated differently after using said language. That all are obligated to continue to give “blank slate” status to a person who has already revealed a strong likelihood of an inability and/or unwillingness to treat us fairly.
Further, that social stigma exists because of the increased power of former “out-groups”—as I said before, the vectors of power, including the power to direct and influence behavior are no longer one-way (from the powerful to the less-powerful or powerless), but now operate in both directions (less powerful and formerly powerless groups now have enough social, political and economic power to influence and affect the behavior of the powerful). In short, we have been and are continuing to do exactly what Sebastian recommends—making ourselves appear to be human in the eyes of many more of our fellow humans. Human enough that many of those fellow humans are willing to engage in acts of solidarity with us.
And the response to that is…”but, but, consequences that actually impact a person enough to inspire them to make a change is unfair! Disproportionate response!” Bah. “Up to and including termination” inspired an end to on the job ass-pats when education and attempts to humanize women did not. It is not the fault of people on the lower end of hierarchical power when people on the higher end insist upon keeping the discretionary power to respect or not respect our boundaries, or respect or disrespect us as persons. Escalating the pushback is how oppressed people become less oppressed. Oppressors do not treat oppressed groups or persons with the same consideration they treat those they regard as human as themselves. They aren’t inclined to listen to mere words from those they regard as lesser beings. Only the “oomph!” delivered by consequences (such as loss of business, loss of job, loss of reputation, punitive financial damages from lawsuits or violations of law, etc.) seem to have the necessary impact to change behavior that humanizes us.
Fuck “hearts and minds”! I just want to be treated as a human being. If the behavior towards me changes, I could give a damn if my status in someone’s heart or mind has changed.
Basically, I do think that employers firing people for speech unrelated to their employment is a problem. But I think one of the ways you *make* your speech unrelated to your job is by not linking them in the same social media account where that speech is taking place.
“It amazes me, the way men will defend the misdeeds of other men. They might seem to vocally condemn those deeds — but we see through them. Their claims are lip-service, because when the chips are down, they will invariably defend the interests of the man and attack the women who stepped forward.”
Who are you talking about? No one here is defending the misdeeds of other men. This is the same argument style as Bush and the Iraq War or fundamentalists and Israel where questioning the wisdom of certain responses to wrongs is incorrectly portrayed as “defending Saddam” or “defending Palestinian terrorism”.
“But why can I not speak of my experience without myself coming under the lens, from other men, unrelated to the issue, who are probably unaware of their own manifest sexism?”
Look, I am a man and quite aware of sexist impulses. I get that. But there are problems with the way you want to respond such that pointing them out can’t be dismissed as just sexism. But since you don’t want to engage about any of that in a concrete way, I’ll respond to La Lubu who has outlined concrete thoughts on the matter.
La Lubu: I don’t understand what you are trying to get at with the fraud example. It seems to be way off topic because we’ve been talking about off the job behavior, while on the job fraud is obviously something that it would be proper for a company to consider when firing someone. My ability to guess meaning is clearly under question here, so I’ll await clarification rather than guessing.
A big part of my objection to the naming and shaming to try to get someone fired concept is that it inappropriately puts your employer in charge of being the morality police for your whole life. But there are other objections that we haven’t even begun to talk about:
1. Who fixes things if your photos end up misidentifying a person and the internet mob goes after them? Are we really trusting the company to be fair about figuring it out, or will they fire first to stop the bad press? [Check your great-place-to-work privilege before answering].
2. How long should we make these people unemployable? 1 year? 10 years? The rest of their lives?
3. Assuming the answer isn’t “the rest of their lives” who decides that they’ve “paid their debt”? How does that get communicated to businesses? Who calls the internet mob off?
4. Who decides what counts as company appropriate watchdog topics? It is super easy to imagine this playing out over anti-war sentiments in 2001 or in pro-abortion activism at some point.
“It seems as if Sebastian is arguing that verbal red flags are not an indicator of nonverbal overt behavior, and frankly I consider that ludicrous. That if someone tells a racist “joke” or uses racial slurs, that we shouldn’t assume that person treats people of color differently than he or she treats white people. That if a man uses misogynist slurs, engages in internet pile-ons against women, and “likes” comments referencing the oral rape of women, that we shouldn’t assume he does this in physical space in his dealings with women.”
If this were always true, we wouldn’t need this discussion because such men would always do things worth getting fired over in their actual jobs. People do things on the internet that they wouldn’t do in real life all the time. People talk about and joke about things they wouldn’t do in real life all the time. Facebook especially is very id oriented.
Policing all this outside behavior through the lens of companies isn’t going to go well. Companies have little incentive to investigate thoroughly to get things right, and every incentive to do whatever it takes to shut the whole thing up. This will have huge class implications because for lower class workers the easiest way to shut things up will almost always be to just fire them.
Patronize whomever you feel like. If you really can’t go to a restaurant if they have a dishwasher who marches in Neo-Nazi rallies, I would judge you to be silly but there are lots of harmless silly things that friends who I love dearly hold to. Part of living in a big pluralistic society is being ok with that. But if you organize to try to make the dishwasher unhireable, you’ve gone into unjust fundamentalist territory and I think that is gravely wrong.
But I won’t try to get you fired from your job over it.
Later in the scenario, I gave the example of finding online misogyny, thus confirming that the incident in question was not a coincidence. I hold that there is no such thing as a person who is an overt, conscious racist or sexist that does not practice said racism or sexism on the job. Period. Most of them know better than to do so right in front of their bosses, but relish every opportunity to exhibit said attitudes in private towards the targets of their bigotry (or even in semi-public, amongst other potential witnesses who would never interfere by actually providing witness in solidarity with the target). They also use every opportunity to remind said targets that it’s “your word against mine, and you can’t do a damn thing about it, ha ha.” Again, I suspect our different outlook on the matter is a result of our different social class standing; your higher social class isolates you from many of the worst abuses (and offers you many more options for escaping such environments).
And let’s be crystal-clear. I’m a blue-collar, “uneducated” single mother. I have no “great job privilege”. I have “goddamn lucky to have a job” thankfulness. I have “am forced to tolerate an outrageous amount of sexist bullshit, lest I find myself in the layoff line” lack of privilege. Check your own damn privilege.
If you really believe this, I don’t know there is anything I can say that will convince you. All I can say is, you’ve apparently led a very, very sheltered life. Online attitudes reflect offline, in-person (including on-the-job) attitudes, though I will agree with you that many people are emboldened by a faux sense of privacy (or isolation—i.e., out of reach of someone’s fist) to be more aggressive with their racism or sexism. But “more aggressive” does not translate into a lack of aggression offline.
And again, the biggest beneficiaries of zero-tolerance policies are lower class workers, as we bear the brunt of racist, sexist attitudes (people of higher social class are more likely to direct such attitudes toward us, and actually have an impact on our lives) than vice versa. Unlike upper-income workers, we don’t have the financial wherewithal to hire attorneys or even necessarily change jobs. Lower class women received a larger benefit from sexual harassment laws than upper class women. That this is not painfully obvious to you surprises me.
Yes, how silly to not want to be around someone who wants to murder you and virtually everyone you love.
THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE MISSING!!!! We have been trying to tell you that men like Nolan DO DO things on the job “worth getting fired over” all the time. They particularly like to target low level female employees. The trick is proving it. You seem to think being sexist and racist on the job is a thing men/white people can’t get away with easily. We are telling you that you are very very wrong about that.
Sexists and racists behave themselves in front of you, because you’re progressive enough that they can’t be sure you’ll have their back and if someone like you corroborates a marginalized person’s account THEN they could very well be fired. But they do not behave themselves with women and people of color, and they have an uncanny way of finding each other and then working in groups.
Sebastian:
But if you organize to try to make the dishwasher unhireable, you’ve gone into unjust fundamentalist territory and I think that is gravely wrong.
I think this overestimates how organized and how long an attention span either internet mobs or sorta-famous individuals like Clementine Ford typically have. In fact, although I could very well just be unaware of an incident, I’m not aware of any incidents where an internet mob was repeatedly getting people fired instead of fired one time. The only one I know of with that long an attention span is GamerGate. Losing a job /= permanently unhireable. I mean, I get that we’ve also been discussing potential consequences if this becomes normalized, but we’ve also been discussing proportionality and it is unfair to say that Ford is making Nolan unhireable IMO.
@pillsy (Alice’s Restaurant scenario)
I think that you could make a case that actual customers/coworkers have standing to talk to the business and someone like Ford does not, but I’m not sure what my opinion is on that at the moment.
ClosetPuritan, I’m trying to respond to how La Lubu seems to want things to be. We are still at the early stages of the internet mob concept, so we can still try to change how they play out. I may be misinterpreting, but La Lubu’s concept seems to be that:
a) corporations ought to (and maybe even have or should have an affirmative duty to) police the outside behavior of all of their employees;
b) corporations ought to be held responsible for the outside behavior of all their employees such that if their employees behave badly outside work, you should cease patronizing the employer;
If that plays out as a norm, it makes someone continually unhireable until the mob forgives them, and frankly “mob forgiveness” is not something I’ve had lots of experience with. When you’re trying to make cultural changes, you have a responsibility to be mindful of how the changes effect things. The fact that you are oppressed doesn’t excuse you from that, and should actually make you more aware of the dynamics. Also the idea that you can just “get another job” is so often employed unfairly against poor people that it is a bit odd to see it played straight here–and that is when you don’t have a history of a mob going after your job. Again, upper class people are likely to weather it all just fine, lower class people not so much.
La Lubu: “And again, the biggest beneficiaries of zero-tolerance policies are lower class workers, as we bear the brunt of racist, sexist attitudes (people of higher social class are more likely to direct such attitudes toward us, and actually have an impact on our lives) than vice versa.”
I’m frankly shocked to see you write this. I assume you are working from the assumption that zero-tolerance policies will be fairly applied (upper class people will escape them much more easily–see how they actually play out in schools for example–hint they are hugely oppressive to black people) and that you are assuming that they will keep middle and upper class people from directing racist attitudes at you (same problem). They will however be yet another tool of getting rid of lower class people.
Kate: “We have been trying to tell you that men like Nolan DO DO things on the job “worth getting fired over” all the time.”
I’m sure many of them do, and that is when you should fire them. But you don’t get to just skip all that by association. Then we are right back in the Communist blacklist situation. It isn’t true that all people who say nasty things on the internet also abuse people in real life. It isn’t true that all people who make nasty jokes are abusers. If that were true, some women on this post, and especially Ford, should be losing their jobs because they are clearly abusers. People say heated things sometimes. Abusers say heated things, probably more often. But not all people who say heated things are abusers. Are you really saying that Ford’s nasty jokes are evidence that she is a real man hater?
It is really disturbing how often we keep coming back to collective punishment in this discussion. Collective punishment is wrong. Seriously wrong.
Also, no one has addressed the “who decides what moral things we are policing” issue. This is a clear danger for progressives, because if you look closely you will see that there are lots of potential internet mobs that aren’t very progressive. They aren’t currently going after jobs on a regular basis, but progressives are fantastic at creating weapons that get used against themselves (see the California initiative process)
Hyperbole much? I have repeatedly said my interest was in behavior. Being a racist or sexist is not an inherent identity; it is behavior that one chooses and can just as easily reject. People who forward racist “jokes” on Facebook are overtly choosing racism—it’s not an unconscious decision on their part. Although “ignorant” in the vernacular, the action itself does not stem from unknowing. Joining sexist pile-ons is also not a matter of unknowing; it’s a matter of consciously choosing which people to recognize as human and which to declare subhuman and not worthy of routine human respect.
You continually overlook the fact that even getting to the point where we are, a point where we are measurably better off re: on-the-job racism and sexism than say, in the era when my grandmothers entered the working world, required (and continues to require) strict laws and policies, rigid enforcement of those laws and policies, and harsh consequences for violations. Sexual harassment didn’t start ending on jobsites until perpetrators started getting fired. Nothing else worked. Definitions didn’t work. Reminders of “the Golden Rule” didn’t work. Attempts at education didn’t work. Attempts at humanizing women didn’t work. Consequences worked. They still do.
I do believe that we are obligated to give others the benefit of the doubt, a “blank slate”, before making assumptions about their character or behavior. I do not believe, and actively reject, the idea that we are obligated to continue to offer them a nonjudgemental “blank slate” after they have demonstrated a clear bias against us, or contempt for us. Perhaps you trust a neo-Nazi in food service to not spit or piss in your food. I don’t. I don’t consider that “silly” or unreasonable. I also consider it reasonable for Jewish people to refuse to be treated by the woman in your linked example. I think there is ample evidence that she could not be trusted to treat Jewish patients with the dignity, care and respect every human being deserves.
(shrug). I’m writing from my experience, as a woman in the building trades. Contractors I’ve worked for that enforce an explicit, written zero-tolerance policy on harassment are contractors where I don’t experience harassment. It really does act a a deterrent to harassers. Contractors who take a lax attitude towards harassment (and especially those with no written policy) are miserable to work for; I am thrust into the position of having to tolerate a high level of harassment (if the employment picture is such that I can’t quit and immediately get another job—and in the rust belt, that is seldom the case. I just get to eat a lot of shit and have it take a piece out of me. So much for that “great job privilege” that for some reason, you think is widespread.).
I don’t know what’s so hard to believe about that. Contractors that piss test have fewer substance abusers in their employ, too. It acts as a deterrent.
No, what’s disturbing is how often you return to abstracting the discussion as being one of ideological purity rather than self-preservation. How often you insist that people who are “nasty” (or “heated”, another weasel word) on the internet are not any more likely to treat the persons who are objects of their contempt with the contempt they demonstrate and admit to. You know, men with a conviction record of domestic violence don’t hit every woman they come across, either. But it behooves every woman who comes across one of these guys to assume she won’t be the exception to the rule.
Collective punishment? HAhahahaha! How about, “avoiding a negative experience”, or “a waste of time”, or “contempt and disrespect”? You’re overthinking this. When I read a story about someone else’s bad experience at “XYZ Inc.”, and I make the command decision to not spend my hard-earned money there, I’m avoiding the bad experience I read about. If you want to think I’m part of a mob action painting the scarlet “A” for “asshole”, feel free. I don’t have the luxury of having my words listened to, and I’m frankly worn out from all the attempts at education and humanizing myself to people who just willfully do not want to include me in their definition of humanity. But it’s amazing how well folks listen when money is involved (and they’re losing a lot of it).
“Hyperbole much? I have repeatedly said my interest was in behavior. Being a racist or sexist is not an inherent identity; it is behavior that one chooses and can just as easily reject. ”
Not hyperbole at all, and you clearly ignored the question. You are advocating a zero tolerance policy for what you define as sexual harassment off the job which includes a single past instance of calling someone a slut on the internet. So, once you have forced the behavior change you desire how will he demonstrate that? Have you considered that at all? It isn’t an easy problem. And until you answer the question, it looks like your answer is “the rest of their lives”.
“You continually overlook the fact that even getting to the point where we are, a point where we are measurably better off re: on-the-job racism and sexism than say, in the era when my grandmothers entered the working world, required (and continues to require) strict laws and policies, rigid enforcement of those laws and policies, and harsh consequences for violations. ”
I haven’t overlooked that fact at all, and have in fact demonstrated a better understanding of that history with the moral clause history–which is directly on point with respect to the slut smear. You are overlooking the fact that requirements around on the job behavior are immensely different than off the job behavior. You appear to have no sympathy whatsoever for why that might be, and no appreciation whatsoever about how inviting intimate corporate intrusion into off work behavior could end up being hugely anti-progressive. Feminists have been fighting for more than a century to keep private questions of their off duty behavior out of the hiring/firing decisions and now you blithely want to bring it right back. That is an incredibly dangerous path you want us all to tread. It will require an unending series of governments and corporations that never choose to meddle in the wrong private decisions.
Further, you aren’t even trying to look at proportionality. I’m sure you could get great results in behavioral modification from executing men who type the word ‘slut’ on the internet, but I’m pretty sure most people would agree that isn’t a just punishment.
You also haven’t even remotely tried to deal with the problems of misidentification. You want an unaccountable mob to always get it right. That’s a rather optimistic assumption. You’re like a person who rightly identifies that people of color are horribly mistreated by the ‘justice’ system, but then comes to the bizarre conclusion that mob justice would be better. Those procedural safeguards exist for a reason. The fact that they don’t lead to perfect outcomes in an imperfect world doesn’t mean that we should just trash them.
You are arguing for a position that I would have been accused of strawmanning if I had talked about it: that under your experience all men who use epitaphs off the job are abusers on the job, therefore companies should police off the job behavior with a zero tolerance policy and since other people can’t be expected to feel safe working with such people they should be fired with no clear mechanism to figuring out when their behavior has sufficiently changed, and no clear mechanism for figuring out which behaviors should be policed.
I suggest you go back through the thread and re-read all my past replies on the likelihood of why Meriton jumped to firing in this instance, rather than demotion and anger management classes.
Getting another job and changing his behavior. At least, that’s how it worked for the guy in the example I offered on my own former jobsite, in my own Local. Sexual harassment education wasn’t enough to change his behavior. Even an explicit policy against sexual harassment didn’t change his behavior. But enforcement of that policy did. He got another job, and never had another incident. That was the impetus he apparently needed in order to “play well with others”. It turned out to be a very easy problem with a very easy solution.
No, you actually haven’t. For one, you refuse to recognize that a “slut smear” is seldom invoked over sexuality, but is rather used to reference performative femininity—that a woman isn’t a “proper” woman, and therefore not deserving of respect or consideration. (you know, not like their mother, sister, wife/girlfriend, and you still seem to be under the illusion that if only we pesky women could make ourselves appear more like good ol’ Mom, Sis, or the Old Lady—or perhaps an acceptable female archetype, say, La Mater Dolorosa, we could end all this harassment against us). Further, your ahistorical version of how “morals clauses” ended does not give credit to the civil rights laws that took the teeth out of them. “Morals clauses” weren’t enforced against straight white men. Title IX was instrumental in ending the enforcement of morals clauses against women because it effectively ended kicking pregnant young women out of school. How did those civil rights laws get passed? Activism of the type you’d rather term “mob action”, despite the nonviolent nature of said activism.
This is rich. Perhaps you’d care to explain this comment.
It’s not “strawmanning” when, during litigation, bias is shown in the documented off-job comments of supervisors that lends credence to the claim of on-the-job discrimination. That’s case law. I mean, sometimes workers don’t even have any personal contact with the individual who has actual authority over their work assignments, pay and conditions….but there’s still a clearly recognizable pattern of discrimination in said assignments, pay and conditions despite that lack of personal contact. You seem to be under the illusion that discrimination is personal and individual, rather than systemic and collective. Organized or semi-organized boycotts are effective because collective action is more effective at ending institutional problems than individual action (see also: strikes, picket lines, work-to-rule, and other labor union tactics).
Sebastian, I am not recommending that companies have a proactive duty to police offsite behavior of their employees. Rather, it behooves them to investigate complaints, determine the legitimacy of.said complaints, and make the decision for themselves whether said complaints warrant any action and what that action would be. Meriton could have required Nolan to complete a sexual harassment training and anger management as a condition of further employment. That they did not is their own business decision.
As a customer or client, my interest is not in punishment, but in avoiding negative experiences in the light of evidence that such are likely. You can make your own choice in regards to whether or not you are likely to have a bad experience in dealing with a misogynist or neo-Nazi; for myself the more prudent course of action is to avoid such persons whenever possible.
@Sebastian H:
Well, in this case Mr Nolan would demonstrate it by… not joining in with Internet misogynist pig piles and scrubbing the racist posts from his FB timeline. It’s not hard. It is, in fact, trivially easy.
So far, despite repeated insistence that Ms Ford’s retaliation was disproportionate, you have yet to actually offer much of an argument to that effect.
Nonetheless, I’ll look at it right now. Contacting Mr Nolan’s employer was a proportionate response to his behavior. So there.
Now what?
He didn’t join in misogynist dog piles already today. So he’s fine right?
The neo nazi didn’t march today either. He’s fine too?
Maybe we should have them swear an oath to be good. Like a loyalty oath?
Sebastian, are you being deliberately obtuse? Are you familiar with the concept of ‘moving forward’? As in my union brother, who moving forward adjusted his behavior to where there were no more complaints about it?
You’re right to imply that a breach of trust takes time to get over. I’d be very reluctant to have any dealings with a former neo-Nazi unless he or she put significant time and effort into demonstrating he or she no longer holds racist attitudes or acts in a racist manner. But it can be done, if the person so chooses.
Sebastian H:
Seems likely. I don’t see any reason for anybody to contact any of his future employers if he doesn’t repeat the behavior. Someone doing that would be acting pointlessly dickish.
I would never hire anyone I knew to have participated in a neo-Nazi march unless I’d seen very compelling evidence they’d reformed. Go ahead and tell me again how I’m morally bankrupt because I don’t want to work with people who want to kill me.
I think it’s also important to remember that employers are seldom willing to give a bad reference. Standard practice is to say “yes, so-and-so worked here during such-and-such time”, period. It opens.employers up to liability to say more. So.the idea that someone would be permanently unemployable for verbal harassment is wrong.
“Sebastian, are you being deliberately obtuse?”
No, I’m asking you to be clear on what it will take for things to have “moved forward” enough that he can get hired again, explain who will judge that, and explain who will let employers know that. You seem to assume it will all work out.
“For one, you refuse to recognize that a “slut smear” is seldom invoked over sexuality, but is rather used to reference performative femininity—that a woman isn’t a “proper” woman, and therefore not deserving of respect or consideration.”
No, I’m not refusing to recognize it, you’re misunderstanding the history of morals clauses. They would commonly be used against women who got pregnant without being married (even if they had been raped). That isn’t performative femininity. They made a moral judgment that such sluts (and I say that only making historical reference, not as my actual judgment of the situation) couldn’t be trusted to work around men because they would be constantly trying to lure married men away from their wives or lure unmarried men into liasons beneath their station. It was off-work actions, brought to the attention of the employer, for which on work actions were than assumed without further evidence and which smear was likely to follow them for as long as it could be known that they had a child out of wedlock. Performative femininity questions come into play with women who were fired over dressing too provocatively (in the judgment of the employer) or not womanly enough (they might trick you into treating them like men at the wrong moment). Both happened, but the out of wedlock pregnancy type of issue is closer to the case at hand (with out of work conduct coming to the attention of the employer).
I think a key problem is that we disagree on whether your average employer is likely to fairly adjudicate this kind of thing for a lower class employee in the face of a media shitstorm. You seem to think that companies will weather a storm in favor of a good lower class employee, investigate deeply and then come to a fair conclusion. My experience is that in face of even small amounts of negative publicity, the company is likely to fire first and ask questions never. That calculus changes for high level management, but otherwise holds. I don’t think we are going to convince each other–so we will have to let the readers of our arguments decide for themselves which seems likely.
La Lubu:
Exactly. As an example, our company stopped putting drivers in trucks before background checks came back after two potential mistakes. One was a guy who had been indicted, but not yet tried, on charges of robbing a pharmacy and, surprise! drug possession. The other was a guy who had multiple current indictments and multiple past convictions for various flavors of grifting. Neither is the sort of person you want to have responsibility for hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise.
However, we do hire people with convictions for assault, kidnapping, theft of various sizes, etc. if their convictions were some time ago and they have had no further issues with violence or theft. Why? Why would we not hire someone currently dealing with an arrest for violence or theft but would be willing to hire somebody who was convicted of violent and/or theft related actions years ago?
(Answer: Because we believe in giving people second chances once they have changed their behavior. At the same time, we don’t want to hire people who have recently stolen (because we don’t want our stuff stolen) or recently been involved with violence (because we don’t want our employees, customers or suppliers to be at risk of bodily harm).)
“I think it’s also important to remember that employers are seldom willing to give a bad reference. Standard practice is to say “yes, so-and-so worked here during such-and-such time”, period. It opens.employers up to liability to say more. So.the idea that someone would be permanently unemployable for verbal harassment is wrong.”
Employers use google. On every hire. Seriously.
If you get fired the way Nolan did, it will show up forever. You’re operating out of a pre-internet paradigm when you make statements like that.
Sebastian H:
We certainly don’t. Why? We don’t care as long as your background check comes back fairly clean. What we care about (from an avoiding the negative point of view) at hire is the likelihood that you will injure or kill one or more of our employees/customers/suppliers and whether you are likely to try to steal from us. We don’t care about your online life as long as it isn’t tied to our company. I feel certain that the vast majority of employers in our industries do not google potential hires (I have no empirical proof, but I know what we do and I know a lot of the companies in our industries).
Sebastian H:
Even if we did google the shit out of prospective employees, it matters whether that happened yesterday or 2 years ago. If it happened two years ago and there had been nothing similar since, it wouldn’t affect our decision.
Whether a company googles potential hires or not depends on several factors, I’d guess. White collar or blue collar jobs, size of company, industry, age of management, etc.
Do some employers use google on every potential hire? Absolutely. Is it the majority? I have my doubts.
Sebastian:
frankly “mob forgiveness” is not something I’ve had lots of experience with.
Nor have I. But like I said, mob forgetfulness seems to be the rule rather than the exception, and in terms of mob behavior it amounts to the same thing. Not that Clementine Ford is a mob.
Ideally, corporations would judge offenses based on how bad they are and not how much of a mob they’ve stirred up. If you want them to behave ideally, whether in that way or in your preferred way–not responding whether it’s an individual or a mob–you have to hold the corporations accountable and criticize corporations, not just the Clementine Fords. Holding a corporation accountable isn’t always easy, but it’s easier than holding a mob accountable.
Sebastian,
This is a total straw man. Your responses are taking on the appearance of trying to find weak points, without really attempting to connect with what a bunch of us (La Lubu, Pillsy, Grace, etc.) are actually saying. You keep mischaracterizing our views in ways that several of us have been trying to address for hundreds of comments now.
No one here, that I can see, has advocated that employers should be required to fire employees for such behaviour – which would be my understanding of a zero tolerance policy.
Some of us believe that, given the sensitive nature of his work (holding keys to people’s living spaces), it was reasonable for the company to fire Nolan when his comment was connected to the company.
Many of us have stated that, given the nastiness of the comments Nolan supported, we think it is very likely that he treats women poorly IRL when he thinks he can get away with it. Most of us think that, had he been a model employee, he would probably not have been fired. You disagree with that point, but characterizing our position in this way after we have given you that explanation is not o.k..
We have repeatedly pointed out that Nolan posted “slut” in support of truly vile comments, some of which included violent rhetoric. You keep insisting on eliding that context. Also, as per above, we don’t know that this was the only reason his company had for firing him.
He did not just post it “on the internet” in general – like on his own blog or Facebook page. He went into Ford’s virtual space to make this comment. He reached into her space, and then called foul when she responded into his space.
This thread had me wondering – what has happened to people who lose their jobs because of widespread criticism in social media?
Looking around, it does seem that people can recover and do find other jobs; there doesn’t usually seem to be a permanent “scarlet letter,” even for people whose names are always going to bring their moment of fame (or in some cases infamy) to the top of any google search. (Or businesses – Memories Pizza seems to be doing as well as ever).
The exception I found is Adria Richards, who seems to have remained unemployed since a social media mob threatened her boss into firing her. (IIRC, they used denial of service attacks on her employer, which is extreme enough to justify the word “mob,” I think).
The two people most targeted by Gamergate – Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn – are, as far as I can make out, self-employed freelancers, and so didn’t have bosses to target.
Shakesville: The Falsest of False Equivalencies
Jonah Lehrer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What Happened to Justine Sacco After Her Life-Ruining AIDS Joke? | UPROXX
Benny Johnson got fired at BuzzFeed. You will believe what happened next. – The Washington Post
What Happened To Lindsey Stone, Whose Life Was Ruined By The Internet? | UPROXX
The followup with Richards is interesting if depressing. I’d sort of forgotten the extent to which that debacle crystalized my views on this subject.
Morals clauses were used against married women who got pregnant by their own husbands, too. Pregnancy itself was a fireable offense, even for married women. Working outside of the home after marriage and especially pregnancy, was seen as immoral and unwomanly, but usually only enforced against women of middle class status and above (richer folk appreciated having working class and poor women handle the nastier jobs they didn’t want to dirty their hands with, so marriage and kids weren’t a barrier. They still judged us as less womanly/unwomanly, but not enough to do the work themselves.) So yeah, it’s about performative femininity. “Good” women don’t do certain things regarded as “unfeminine”, and in the time frame you’re talking about, that included being a mother and continuing to work (for women of the ‘right’ social class, of course).
All unmarried women, regardless of sexual history of behavior, are still seen as a possible threat to marriages. Please don’t delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
I was totally fine with a neo-Nazi working in the kitchen of a restaurant I eat at until I read this. Ew. (And I feel naive not to have thought of that.)
But in an area outside of food prep – say, a clerk at a store where I’m buying some paper – I really don’t care if the person behind the counter is a neo-Nazi who thought Hitler had a point and people like me should be dead. Or, rather, I guess I care – I’d prefer that nobody would be a neo-Nazi – but given that neo-Nazis exist, I don’t mind if they’re a clerk at a store I shop at, versus having some other job someplace I don’t go.
That said, in a way I think a neo-Nazi should receive more protection than Nolan did. Being a neo-Nazi is, at some level, a political program, and I think that our system should bend over backwards to protect people’s rights to non-violently advocate political programs, even despicable political programs.
Going to someone’s FB page where they’re talking about the misogynistic abuse they’ve received on FB, so you can call them a “slut,” isn’t supporting a political policy or a party or a candidate. It’s just being an asshole. I’m actually MORE comfortable with this guy being fired after being outed as the sort of person who leaves misogynistic abuse on stranger’s FB pages, then I would be if he were fired for being a neo-Nazi. Not because being a misogynistic asshole is “worse” than being a neo-nazi, but because it’s less political. I think political positions should be more protected than being an asshole.
Not because being a misogynistic asshole is “worse” than being a neo-nazi, but because it’s less political. I think political positions should be more protected than being an asshole.
I agree with this, and I think it ties back in with Veronica D’s earlier example of her coworker who is a neoreactionary but who doesn’t go around harassing people.
@Ampersand:
Forget spitting in soup, neo-Nazis have far too long and varied a history of criminal violence for me to ever trust that one is just going to non-violently advocate for their preferred political program.
Ampersand:
Welcome to my world. There’s a reason that officers like restaurants where we can watch the food prep, like Subway. We figure we eat less stranger spit that way. I am aware of one investigation during my career, in my region, where an employee at a local bakery-type place was recorded on videotape jacking off into the batter. I can’t remember what exactly they ended up charging him with.
But I have no reason to think the incident is unique.
Grace
Maybe I’m paranoid, but I actually never return food and accept anything else in exchange. I’m just assme that if I send something back, anything subsequently brough to my table will have been f**ked with. I either eat it, or send it back and go hungry.