Meta bans staff from open discussion of Roe vs. Wade(businessinsider.com) |
Meta bans staff from open discussion of Roe vs. Wade(businessinsider.com) |
Some people feel like discussing this in anything other than emotional terms is inappropriate, some people feel like we need to discuss the legal theory and history behind what happened, and some people feel like we should focus on the material/economic affects of the ruling. Each group feels that the others are ignoring the important parts, so it turns into a mess. Especially once you add into that that a proper understanding of the issue requires understanding some basic constitutional law, civics, and female anatomy, so a bunch of people are just saying things that are incorrect.
Also wise for their communication/public facing employees, who are going to be wading through a lot of related bullshit and should have SOME respite from it.
And then, to make it even worse, they went on to tell the crowd that you HAVE to care about these issues if you care about Roe v Wade. And if you don't, then "get the hell out of our way". So either you agree 100% with the hivemind and their dated BLM script, or fuck you. To say nothing of the fact that the person shouting this stuff seemed to cherish just how many different labels she could attach to herself to appear more credible.
I consider myself a staunch independent and this was downright insulting. The operatives instigating all of this do not want people making rational points with their minds, they want a mental hegemony to act as a bedrock for their political war machine.
Given that and how political discussions seem to be playing out everywhere, I don't think anyone should be supporting these kinds of discussions at work. Should companies willingly allow space for crowdsourced political brainwashing?
Half of Black people in Georgia oppose abortion, but 90% vote Democrat. I wonder what it’s going to do to Democratic turnout in Georgia if donors in New York and California make the 2022 and 2024 elections all about abortion.
Free speech is a wonderful thing, but there can be too much of a good thing. Learning when to shut up can be valuable too, one doesn’t offend people like the parent post.
IMO, the biggest issue here is that no one has any patience for anything anymore (outside of what they’re getting paid to be thoughtful about), so nuance has gone out the window.
Everyone believes that the start of human life is a core issue. It’s the basis for the pro-life movement. It’s also a core component of the pro-choice movement (that it doesn’t start that early, thus not killing babies, etc).
There are other things some people believe are core which others don’t believe even exist:
* many people are happy with this ruling because they want to bring mens’ right to “paper abortion” to the front. The argument is if she can do whatever with her body and not be subject to something undesirable for nine months, than he should have the same right since his hardship can last 18 years. The supporting arguments include absolute control means absolute responsibility (if pregnancy was accidental and she decides to keep it, responsibility is hers) and others, along with the greater discussion of perceived bias in family court. Opposing arguments mostly center around the welfare of the child. * some people are of the opinion that “if you’re not a woman, shut up”. Others are using that phrase to support their opinion on trans recognition. Still others are using that phrase to highlight situations where women have gained influence in what many men might call “mens spaces”
The reality is pregnancy is a two-party result and so it’s impossible to expect one party to quietly step aside, more so when there is skin in the game. This involvement in fact helped win R v W in the first place!
If you favor originalism, the the 9th amendment guarantees unenumerated rights which were deep rooted at the founding. Abortion before “quickening” was legal in all 13 states at the signing and had been part of common law for hundreds of years, so the 9th applies. The 14th amendment should apply that to the states, and the argument some originalists make about resetting the clock seems dumb to me.
So here are two very reasonable paths to the right that don’t involve the question about when laws start or some vague notion to the right to privacy. I think you need to have both an activist reading of constitutional law and a disregard for security of ones person to sidestep both arguments.
That banning abortion leads to the deaths of thousands of young women.
Pretty sure we all agree that a girl's life starts before she can get pregnant.
"Core" does not have a clear meaning here, so let's be more precise: everyone agrees it's an important issue, but not everyone agrees it's a decisive issue. Many pro-choice people believe that no person has a right to demand part of someone else's body for themselves, so even if a fetus is a person the mother still has the right to remove it. Comparisons to the illegality of forced organ donation are often made here.
Note that I'm not taking a position here. I'm just explaining a position many hold. To the extent that you ascribe a different reasoning/motivation to pro-choice folks, I think your "everyone believes" is not a valid axiom. Whether intentionally or not, it comes across more as an appeal to (questionable) popularity, and pretty much make Mezzie's point about how impossible it is to talk about this.
Yes, the core issue is here. Though no-one seriously argues that a foetus is not human, nor alive: the issue is "is it a person (yet)?". Is it something, or someone? Answering that question - not an easy one - makes one swing one way or another of the issue.
To be frank, this is Twitter in a nutshell to an outsider like me: a major personal time-waster that typically ends in anger and depression.
I guess it's not surprising that internal conversations for the platform that owns a significant share of the public discourse can't figure out how to discuss topics like this, but that sure makes me sad. Is it even possible to have effective conversations about these topics online at all? If Twitter can't figure out how to do it, then who can?
A foetus is "alive" since the conception. "Wrong" says the other side, it is alive when (something).
Contraception and sex ed are key. "Wrong" says the other side, you can just be abstinent and learn as you go because this is natural.
Ignoring would be simpler, because you could realize that what you are ignoring actually makes sense. We are in a case where each side has well defined views on the important things of the adversary.
For example, I'm pro-choice and my own side would be ready to flay me alive for agreeing with the legal theory behind the overturning + thinking the economy is likely to be more important politically than abortion. I'm on their side; my opinions matter because they determine which strategies I think would be best to pursue. (In this case, that we need to legislate what we want + that people can't organize to do so unless they have stable housing/food/basic needs so we'll have to help people with that if we want their time and brainpower for social change.)
On the pro-life side, there's a lot of bickering about whether or not the women should be punished (versus the abortion providers) and there is a decent contingent that actually wants their fellows to put their money where their mouths are and financially support pregnant women and their kids.
Talking with enemies is always fraught. This is a dumpster fire because we can't talk to our ALLIES except in thought-terminating cliches.
Except that's not the kind of country USA is supposed to be like some middle-eastern countries for example.
In the USA you are allowed to believe/practice whatever crazy religion you want.
But your rights stop at another person's autonomy.
But also unjustly in the USA the corporation has way more rights than the individual, every time and that's perpetuated by every "side" of political power.
Here's Ginsberg explaining why it was on life support 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pVnvBCzTyI
In short: we do not have a right to privacy any more. That a majority of rights we took for granted rested on that implied right will come as a shock to a large number of people who supported vaccine passports and mandates and vice versa. You will be forced to show proof of covid vaccination at the court house while having your interracial marriage dissolved.
Welcome to America.
Even Thomas doesn’t disagree that there are implied rights. His view is that they originate from the “privileges and immunities” clause, not the “due process clause.” But nobody disagrees, for example, that marriage is a right protected by the Constitution (although they disagree on what counts as marriage).
Business Insider posted an article in 2019 on Facebook data showing that its "best-performing content is almost entirely from right- and far-right-wing publications and personalities" [1]
It's not entirely unlikely that in the intervening years, left-leaning employees have been more likely to leave, and right-leaning employees more likely to join.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-right-wing-echo-cha...
I'd also expect that the majority of FB's right-leaning employees are of a SV libertarianish bent, and most of them are pro-choice or apathetic.
FB strikes me as a company with a very mercenary, self-interested workforce more than a partisan one.
I don't believe this is true in western societies anymore. Even in the US, people who describe themselves as "very religious" or belong to a church are the minority.
Politics affect people's daily lives. Suggesting that people should just ignore the inherent emotional component of these decisions and the impact that they have on our lives is both incredibly unrealistic and quite a privileged position to occupy.
Silencing them is a recipe for a chain reaction / cascade of failures. It is not a winning strategy.
Talking to co-workers can be quite fulfilling and exciting when conversing about engineering, marketing, or other work related subjects you are passionate about. However, anytime politics, etc are brought up I (for one) leave the conversation feeling in a worse state of mind than when I first got into it. That is very unproductive.
For this reason, I believe that the workplace should be left to work related things (including conversations) and anything else should ideally be done out of work. Even if involving the same group of people.
Abortion is not the labor movement, but the principle holds.
If I had to work with someone every day who insists on talking about something that'll be filling up the next month of news cycle, I'd rather find somewhere else to work
edit: I personally support choice, but I don't support people who try to maneuver every conversation in a political us vs them direction. People who do this irl are insufferable and unprofessional
edit: and not only this, but people who will harass, sabotage, and smear coworkers over things like this. If someone thinks this kind of behavior is OK, it makes me much less likely to be sympathetic to whatever they're trying to accomplish. This kind of behavior should be banned for the same reason that prayer in school should be banned, and for the exact same reasons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
I think it's reasonable. It has nothing to do with not getting people distracted, but all to do with having one less problem to deal with.
Those who want to be vocal about this right now are largely opposed to the court's decision. So this does not appear to be a neutral decision.
Whereas if they listen to that same opinion by overhearing two co-workers talk, then it's not their problem anymore.
This isn't Meta taking a stance on the actual abortion issue, it's just them being pragmatic.
Has anyone here organized a political discussion at work involving more than 20 people?
Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the Facebook/Meta executive team are partly responsible for the reversal. No surprise that they don’t want their staff thinking a bit too much about this.
Do you have any actually citable evidence that shows that either of them were involved in the push for Kavanaugh's nomination and/or confirmation?
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
You could argue that his personal political beliefs have nothing to do with the company, but he serves as an advocate for conservative voices within FB. For better or worse, his political beliefs are a large part of Facebook and the other executives enable that. The executive team directly represents the company in a way that your average worker does not and for workers to not discuss things executives do that directly impact them is wrong.
The topic has all the right factors:
- Nobody actually wants to change their minds.
- Each side thinks the other side is worse than a serial killer.
- No feasible way to make a judgement who is right or wrong.
- No way to get people to accept that judgement.
For those who prefer to focus on product development (i.e. “work”) , this restriction is a welcome reprieve from the near-constant virtue signaling and propaganda that distracts from getting work done.
Context matters here. media are positioning this as censorship, when in fact it’s one issue among dozens throughout the year where the activists have been “throttled”. If anyone is being censored, it would be the employees who would rather just work during the day and keep politics outside of the office.
If someone is not meeting their work targets due to distractions, deal with that as it's always been handled. You can trust people to manage their own distractions with slight adjustments from authority. Facebook's policy here is micro management to the extreme.
FYI: Meta doesn't use email much, 99% of internal comms is done within the walls of Workplace. I'm curious if it has a CLI or an API.
When activism enters the workspace, professionalism leaves.
[0] https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/285...
If they want to stay out of politics, then do that. But its extremely difficult for modern businesses to not have a hand in politics. That's fine; and to some degree I respect the line companies like Coinbase walk, where they push agendas that are fairly directly related to their business. Meta goes far beyond that, into financing for (great and important!) issues like voter suppression & minority representation. If they're going to open the floodgates, they can't be uncomfortable when some murky water comes flooding in.
[1] https://about.facebook.com/facebook-political-engagement/
How would this apply in small businesses or businesses that don't engage in lobbying?
Yes because the line workers don't just discuss it they fight over it and make everyone angry / depressed and destroy productivity
They can’t have it both ways.
When the "activist" types push politics into workplaces they are not doing it so they can talk about what they feel. They are doing it so they can find the people who disagree and damage their careers. Maybe I am cynical here but I have seen careers be seriously damaged this way.
People work much better when they're happy and can be themselves with like-minded individuals. Companies like Google realized this in the 90s and ensured that they proactively have what they need to be happy (feeding employees, paying for healthcare premiums, etc) to great success. You see this continue with things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31871581 IMO.
It's really easy to say that you as a business care about gay rights in order to have gay employees come work for you, but if you then contribute political donations to a politician who sees gay people as an abomination you can't seriously be surprise when people go "hey what the fuck".
I have never encountered that with an employer. Is that a California thing?
While I fully agree with what you’re saying, I’m wondering if Facebook actually agrees with you and that this is simply an application of existing policy or if this is a one-off experiment for them. The article seems a bit unclear.
Alright, it's clear that you're against this, but what's the argument for allowing this? In other words, why should the company tolerate using its channels as a soapbox to advance your political agendas, especially if it's a drain on productivity? I want to shitpost on company time/equipment/networks as much as the other guy, but let's not pretend it's some sort of right, or that being denied the ability to do that is some sort of moral tragedy.
During the time that the employer is purchasing from you, your duty is to your employer, fulfilling their legal requests.
If you don't fulfill this duty, they will no longer have a desire to buy your time.
It's really not any more complicated than that.
That is a fine rule if work expects nothing of you when you clock out at 5 pm.
People have rights. And they have needs and desires. And companies that are driven primarily to make profit will ignore those things.
I think that companies can fight the recent decision without allowing employees to get in arguments with one another and be at each others throats over such a polarizing issue.
Not allowing people to proselytize at work would likely make it more stable. It's sort of like in ancient Persia where they didn't allow missionaries: because they cause unnecessary friction
The workplace is not a social club. You can still socialize with willing coworkers after work where everyone is free to leave with no repurcursions.
We’re taking about the thing that each of us spends 1/3 of our weekdays doing. The majority of our waking hours. It’s one of the largest aspects of all our lives, and is fundamentally derived from the outcomes of very recent political battles over the roles of individual laborers.
I believe that we owe it to ourselves and, as a basic matter of respect, to our coworkers, to have important discussions. If you don’t want that for yourself, then you can stick to sports and weather. That’s fine too!
We can tweet angrily all day long, but those in power are going to continue doing what they do because they know we're just going to tweet about it and that just doesn't matter.
I don’t agree with my coworkers on everything. But when they talk about politics I listen, and try my best to engage in a cogent discussion.
Maintaining a culture of political discussion at work is critical to both healthy corporate cultures and healthy civic processes, which might provide a hint as to why Meta is opposed to it (outrage is their business model.)
Oh, those in power are actively manipulating you to be upset about things that do not interfere with their profits. Somehow, nobody is protesting against unviability of single-income households, lack of retirement savings, part-time employment/independent contractor bullshit used to skirt regulations, etc. It's always Worker Alice against Worker Bob and never Workers against the Corporation.
It’s obviously not that simple, though: there are lots of opinions that are a priori incompatible with a functioning workplace, such as beliefs that fundamentally dehumanize one’s colleagues. In those instances, I’d argue that the hostile work environment begins the moment those beliefs are aired.
(And, to the best of my knowledge, no court has ever concluded that the particular derived beliefs of an individual are protected as an extension of their religious rights. Religious rights include things like being given reasonable accommodations for worship and lifestyle requirements; it doesn’t require your coworkers to placidly accept whatever positions you’ve extended from the larger religious doctrine.)
Not that I will do this, but when I see people talk about things like this, they usually do not feel the same if I suggest what I might do. I think the abortion laws in my state need a little loosening (though not a lot) but there are other people who want them even tighter. Are you just as okay with them agitating at work? Or will you want them to be censored by HR or fired or passed over for promotion/bonus?
Instead, you should put your best self forward and treat your political positions as a humanizing element. It’s been my experience that extremely healthy workplace discussions can occur when people start from a place of human respect, not agreement (indeed, it seems like agreeing parties eventually find something to disagree over, no matter how trivial.)
I think having serious conversations with my coworkers is a very good thing for all parties involved, especially when I don’t want them to eventually become friends. Opinions and beliefs are plainer that way.
it's critical to stand with others, but it's dumb to hold back good things for a minority group all groups can get what they want, and ostracizing and exiling others because they don't care enough about all the other things some cabal of the organizers of some particular movement/protest is the exact opposite of accepting others. and yes, there are issues where the tolerance of intolerance can become a serious problem, but to find those it's surprisingly not enough to apply mob justice on the spot. aaaaand yes, there are those things where even that's okay (let's say someone starts to unfurl a nazi flag)
(and excuse me for my own rudimentary dumbing down.)
OP said:
>Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg ... are partly responsible for the reversal [of Roe v Wade].
I would wager that it's fair to say that Kaplan would've pushed for Kavanaugh whether he was employed by FB or someone else. Unless someone can show me where he did this with the instruction and/or support of Zuckerberg/Sandberg, I am reluctant to hold them "partly responsible" for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, despite my pre-existing misgivings towards both of them. Kaplan, on the other hand? Sure.
>One of the highest held positions in FB pushed for and advocated for political positions that directly impact workers.
Yup! On this we agree. But again, that's Kaplan we're talking about, not Zuckerberg/Sandberg.
>You could argue that his personal political beliefs have nothing to do with the company, but he serves as an advocate for conservative voices within FB. For better or worse, his political beliefs are a large part of Facebook and the other executives enable that. The executive team directly represents the company in a way that your average worker does not and for workers to not discuss things executives do that directly impact them is wrong.
Just because I am reluctant to toss blame around with abandon doesn't mean that I don't share this viewpoint.
I don't actually think it matters--if you have100,000 Facebookers, you keep them from squabbling over politics in groups larger than 20 because it's good for productivity and retention. You don't fret about which employee side is winning.
In a different world, managers could still have discussions with employees about hitting their work targets without needing to tell them what to talk about with other employees.
You don't need to participate in these discussions or read them. I'd say it's fine to relegate such discussion to certain channels within the company. But banning it altogether is taking a position.
Not to mention the fact that Facebook influences politics every day. Blocking employees from having a discussion about that, which is very work-related, is authoritarian.
Zuck is still running the Thiel playbook here.
*but less often because it's harder for employees to coordinate
https://news.gallup.com/poll/358364/religious-americans.aspx
i’m not sure this is at all an accurate depiction of americans and religion. last i looked into it—which admittedly was like two years ago—an absolutely terrifying number of americans believed in angels and god. if i’m remembering correctly, it was a wild shocking number, like more than 70%.
i mean, if we’re limiting it to only self-described “very religious” maybe, but believing in god and angels is suspect enough in a persons rational judgement and that absolutely is not a minority of people.
My point is that the adversaries do not ignore the important points of the other side. These are usually the important point for them as well, they are just exactly at the other side of the spectrum.
This is why there is no way for them to come to consensus as the differences of opinion are about these points.
It is not like someone, when hearing the arguments of the other side, would say "oh, I did not think about this because i thought it was important"
Now a company asks its employees to forgo that power and liberty. Why did we take the power of policy from the aristocrats in the first place? We can of course go back to shut up, work the field peasant model and let them enjoy discussing policy for us while we produce goods.
What comes first? Your employer or your rights?
I don't think the French, for example, applied guillotines to solve the problem of "aristocrats talking too much policy."
Yes. Just not at scale, and not in a way that prioritizes ad revenue via "engagement" at all cost.
Prioritizing longer form, in depth content, and discouraging "rapid reaction hot takes" helps a lot. The social media companies could optimize for this, and you see it on HN with the "Sorry, this particular thread is getting short, snippy, and too rapid, you can't reply to it for a while" mechanism.
But short, snippy, and angry is good for engagement. So it remains.
Sometimes some of the ones with guest writers will host a similar kind of exchange all in one place.
Only if there is some prior trust, if only by virtue of getting along for some time.
If you generally like the other person, and they come up with some incredibly stupid take you're more inclined to listen and ask for clarification than if the other person is unknown to you and says something that seems mildly wrong.
Political discussion is possible if there is a pre-existing and lasting relationship.
There is no such monster as "politically neutral." That is synonymous with "supporting the status quo," which is a political stance. It's the trolley problem - not deciding is still opting into a bad option.
For a sample size of one, while I am very guilty of having many politically charged conversations with coworkers, I have always kept them physically /outside/ the workplace. At work we confine conversations strictly about business and customers.
This faction's support for Democrats is rapidly disintegrating, based on the massive shift to Trump seen in the Texas border counties in 2020. Like, 30 points' worth of movement.
Many will consider a girl chosing a dangerous, illegal procedure as a criminal and therefore less worthy of consideration. More so than an innocent child who had no choice in its conception. My guess is they won't seriously consider the argument until they themselves, or their adult daughters, are literally in the situation of needing an illegal abortion themselves. (And possibly only in an extreme circumstance like molestation or rape, as some are taught self shame and hatred every week at church.)
2. even if you accept that there would be "deaths of thousands of young women", I doubt those deaths would sway the opinion of someone who thinks each abortion is murder (ie. 629,898 "deaths" from abortion vs "thousands" of "deaths")
backalley abortions.
i'm 100% anti-clotheshanger.
it is interesting that a lot of people on this site need to be intellectually spoonfed into understanding that this is the major issue that most pro-choice people focus on.
you can't magically turn all those abortions into unproblematic births without seeing deaths due to backalley abortions. it is like arguing that by banning drugs you can make drug use go away. you just discount the desperation those women are under and consider them criminals and are okay with the stochastic death penalty.
thanks for clarifying, but I still need a source for the "deaths of thousands of young women" claim. The best I could find with a cursory search is:
"In Brazil, where abortion is also illegal, it’s estimated that 250,000 women are hospitalized from complications from abortions, and about 200 women a year die from the complications"
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/how-many-...
>it is interesting that a lot of people on this site need to be intellectually spoonfed into understanding that this is the major issue that most pro-choice people focus on.
Or maybe you should clearly state what the basis of your numbers are the first time around, rather than asserting a number and letting your reader figure out what the basis is?
You can't just take the number for live births and apply it to abortions. The actual number from people who making direct observations instead of committing statistical malpractice seem to be around 0.7 deaths per 100K abortions. The authors say it might be even lower; there's certainly no rational reason to believe it has gotten worse since the last numbers were made available. (BTW I do wonder why they're no longer available, and suspect political pressure was involved much as with tracking gun deaths.)
https://scdhec.gov/risks-abortion
Besides considering the difference between safe vs. unsafe abortions, a real comparison of abortion vs. live-birth death rates would also have to consider pregnancies that end in miscarriage, and the fact that the availability of safe abortion in high-risk cases improves prognoses for live birth. A particularly instructive example is Romania, which saw abortion death rate go from 20/100K to 148/100K when abortion was restricted in 1966, and then back down to 9/100K after the restrictions were removed in 1989.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709326/
BTW note that the abortion death rate in 1965 Romania was lower than the live-birth death rate in modern US. It's currently a safer option for the mother in a great many cases, but would become much worse if it had to go underground, and some of us think that matters.
I agree it'll be nearly impossible to convince people who already see abortion as murder.
Then tell them to stop lobbying. Period.
This leads to some people actively avoiding working with and for any kind of activist, or anyone related to activists. If you can see middle ground in any non extreme argument, one must be a bigot.
This sounds like your position is that anyone who advocates for anything (esp. when it's directly impacting them, but unrelated to work) only has one singular goal of weeding out disagreement and getting rid of it, which I think is ridiculous.
Humans are social creatures and we largely shape our perspectives by iterating with new data and communication. People can be (and IMO largely are) advocates for things that are important to them, have opinions on things, and don't have a singular focus of destroying anyone with different viewpoints.
On the other side, all humans have their limits to cooperation. As you have social interactions with anyone your viewpoint of them change, and realistically if I find out something about a co-worker through discussion like they believe that the 2020 election was stolen because Trump told them so it does inevitably make me scrutinize this person harder. What if you found out that a co-worker thought black people were genetically inferior or that women don't deserve to vote? At that point it's hard to work with someone with such a fundamentally different view of the world.
Is it "cancel culture" to say "we don't want nazis to work here"?
I find people throwing around the word "nazi" in this way incredibly offensive. Every time I hear a non-Jewish person throw this word around as a political accusation it makes me sick to my stomach
and why does it make me sick to my stomach? Because it shows how people have become so detached from the atrocities of the 20th century that they have the audacity to throw around that word and use it as a political tool. Please find a different word to describe people you disagree with
Life used to be, if anything, more political.
Earlier in the 20th century, there were a lot more (local) newspapers and they all had very pointed points of view. Radio stations tended to be independent and if they had news broadcasts, it would be hyper-local and often political. Hell, thriving union membership gave us the greatest prosperity this country has seen and unions are very political.
In the first half of the 20th century we even had such a healthy, political society that more than two parties were often deemed viable.
In the 19th century the arguments for papers still hold. And voter turnout was much higher[1], albeit more male and more white.
[1] https://historyincharts.com/the-history-of-voter-turnout-in-...
The concerning part is more that some workplaces have people or cultures that push politics very hard. Where you either agree with prevailing sentiment or are penalized in your career. In O&G you can not easily be a Democrat (or you had better be a Manchin Democrat). In tech you can not easily be a Republican (or you had better be a Romney Republican). I have seen people's careers fucked up by somebody who hated their politics. In other words it sounds like you are approaching this in good faith. But not everybody does. Or sometimes people do but they get mad and stop thinking so much. And that is hard to manage, and can make workplaces bad and hostile.
And of course there is always the problem that it is harder to maintain civility at scale like Facebook.
In reality, who knows? But I’ll continue to be optimistic, at least until that’s banned at work too.
That's enough for the court to hear a case on it again. Along with cases on gay marriage, anal sex and contraceptives.
A year ago I made the case that if we can force people to divulge their vaccination status then we can force people to divulge their sexual history. If a new disease showed up we could well ask if they had anal sex and lock them up in quarantine if they had.
With the current outbreak of monkeypox and the current court that isn't a thought experiment any more.
Liberals have spent the last decade hacking away at the right to privacy as hard as they could, the vaccine mandates being only the latest and greatest attack on personal freedoms from the party which supposedly stood for individual rights. This is not rocket science. Anyone could have seen this coming, but we were too busy owning the conservitards to notice that we were destroying the bedrock of the last 50 years of social progress.
Well here we are.
No it’s not. The existence of an independent, unchallenged basis invariably kills the possibility of Supreme Court review.
Thomas is on solid legal footing to argue that the “Due Process” clause doesn’t protect anything other than the right to receive legal process before being deprived of a legal right.
Extrapolating from that to interracial marriage, which rests on a different and vastly firmer legal ground, is a dirty smear tactic against a man who is himself in an interracial marriage.
You're calling him so morally bankrupt that he would only vote impartially on laws that don't impact him personally, while he would vote with his self interest in all other cases.
Your right to privacy is not absolute; the state (and society in general) frequently need to know things about you to function well, including protecting public health and reducing senseless death.
This is a necessary evil for us to have a civilization in the first place and is not "destroying the bedrock of the last 50 years of social progress." Vaccine "mandates" are not unduly invasive, because the vaccine is free and shown beyond all reasonable doubt to be safe.
In any case, Loving v. Virginia was not decided on the basis of privacy at all - it was decided under the Equal Protection clause and the Due Process clause. If Thomas gets his way and decides to revisit the conclusion in this case, it will be because he does not think that marriage is a protected under the Privileges and Immunities clause.
It will have nothing to do with the right to privacy, because that case had nothing to do with it.
Privacy violations are NOT a necessary evil. They are the slipperiest of slopes. Look to china to see where this road ends. The government is not our parents, it’s a naughty power hungry child.
A thought experiment.
You get too drunk and pass out in a bar.
I take you home a f hook you up to a person with failing kidneys so that you filter their blood.
If you unhook yourself they will die.
Should you go to prison for unhooking yourself?
I'm not American, so forgive me for barging in, but it seems to me you have two core issues:
First there is the debate over when a Fetus should be considered a person and receive the rights that come with it.
Secondly there is a debate over states rights and what topics the federal government should get a say in.
Should any random person A be forced to lose their bodily autonomy to keep random person B alive?
I think no. I shouldn't have to give you my kidney. Even if I can have it back in 9 months.
I don't think its unreasonable that a fetus, being a clump of cells that cannot survive and is not independently living, has less rights to life than a minor child
The mother is the fully independently living human in this case with full rights, those should not be overridden by a clump of cells with potential
If we judge everything by it's "potential" then we need to start charging men for masturbating and not saving their ejaculate and charging women for having menstrual cycles
Even after working at a place for years, it is very disheartening when people discuss bs that affects me personally yet if I even say anything it would be things that will offend them deeply.
Off work I could speak my mind and refuse to paricipate in offwork activities but during work that declined chat request might offend you or you might see it as not supporting you or your cause.
If I decline a request to chat about abortion for example, will you see it as a sign of my not supporting you? In that case it might affect how well you work with me? Then what? The person that has the upperhand in the power dynamic speaks and the other people agree?
If I had a private office and didn't have to block out background conversation with noise-cancelling headphones and loud music that would be fine, yeah.
Happy I can mainly work from home nowadays.
These sound like the kinds of employee privileges you’d like to negotiate for at work, ideally with multiple other coworkers backing you. The kind of thing that would ideally come from multiple discussions, some of which would ultimately boil down to your and your employer’s obligations. Let’s hope that won’t be too political for your taste, should you decide to stop working from home!
I preferred that to being distracted at work.
If you want to listen to employees talk pro-life / pro-choice, join the groups for that and do so. Keeping Roe v. Wade discussion out of the equivalent of Slack #general or All-Hands email list seems more than reasonable.
The baseline position here (“don’t create political distractions in large channels”) is reasonable on face value. But I have difficultly believing that it’s not pretextual, and that the real goal isn’t to generally chill political discussion between colleagues.
Pro-choice Democrats have painted themselves into a tough spot. After moving left on race and immigration, they lost significant support in the Midwest and Rust Belt. They assumed that pickups among Hispanics in the southwest and south would offset those losses. But Hispanics are more conservative than whites on abortion. (Polling shows that about the same percentage of both, 40%, oppose abortion: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini.... But abortion views are strongly correlated with age, and the median Hispanic is 14 years younger than the median white. Which means that at any given age range—such as the age ranges that tend to vote—Hispanics are more conservative. Moreover, because Democrats win only a minority of the white vote, they need to win 70%+ of the Hispanic vote.)
Democrats have reframed figures like David Portnoy and Joe Rogan—folks who appeal to white working class folks in the Midwest and Rust Belt—as “right wing” and “racist, sexist, and homophobic.” But note that both strongly sided with liberals on Roe being overturned: https://www.foxnews.com/media/barstools-dave-portnoy-rips-ro.... This group is less religious than the GOP as a whole, and has long been willing to at least go along with keeping Roe even if they were personally pro life.
Democrats traded a less religious, more individualistic part of their coalition, for a more religious, more family oriented one.
It seems to be the Republicans game to lose, which they have proven to be far better at avoiding than the Democrats. Abortion though is one issue that Republicans have bet the ranch on in the past with disastrous results. It is a land mine for them if they go too far with it.
If I'm a parent of a small child, and I decide to completely stop feeding it, and they die, did I do something morally and/or legally wrong? I think most would answer yes on both fronts. So the question is, is there an inherent difference between these two situation?
The majority of Americans do not support elective abortion at 39 weeks, so that means by definition they support some regulations. In other words, there has to be a line drawn somewhere. The question is, where?
People like you must have always been in positions of power and priviledge. I have been at the other end enduring all sorts of horrific remarks and being forced to keep quiet to save my career. Now I look back at those jobs and the first thing I always remeber is how horrible it felt people saying ignorant and hurtful things day in and day out and being forced to listen to that or disagree and not get my contract renewed, and affect other political power dynamics that can literally ruin my life.
So please sir/madam, don't shit where you eat. Not everyone appreciates the smell while they eat.
No need for these assumptions. Your argument is clear without them.
Maybe you and i would not respond the same way on the same situation, and that's OK. Personally, when i had coworkers that would say things that i consider totally indefensible, yes, it made me feel terrible and angry, but at the same time, i was at least glad to now know who i was dealing with. I knew that person couldn't be trusted, and how i should (avoid to) interact with them. This is especially true for me in the cases where such person is a superior, or when nobody else in the organization calls on their shit; those are start-to-look-for-another-job situations for me personally.
And, sincerely, i don't think banning such topics from work environments would work for these kind of cases. Those people will keep being the way they are and acting their shitty way when and where they feel they'll get away with it; you'll just may not know who they are, yet.
Disclaimer: i'm not from the USA, or a "first world" country, so it's very possible for our cultures and work environments where we've been to be quite different.
You say it would affect you do bad you might even leave a job. So essentially you are excluding people with disagreeable views from the workplace harming their ability to provide for themselves and family. That is categorically unfair and anti democratic. Instead of people changing their views peacefully you are threatening them this way and they will also need to use force in return. You only feel this way in my opinion because you have options and your views are in the majority. Many of your views at a point were unpopular.
I do not go to work to socialize or play politics. I am there to provide labor and services in exchange for money. Quite frankly, on just about any political topic my views would offend people on any end of the political spectrum because I like to think for myself instead join the hivemind and go with party propagnada. You want to take that libery away from me. You want to force me to agree with you or become unemployed, because the other end of the political spectrum will also feel the same way as you. You think what I said before about the hypotetical person bob is bad? Ok, what if Jane is a transexual working at a factory in the deep south, how do you think that person is treated? They won't hear nice things about transexuals I can assure you that and they may not be able to move either (and they shouldn't have to).
The phrase "don't shit where you eat" comes from the fact that disease spreads and wipes out civilizations when they fail to so that. In this case, the specifics of your politics are not relevant but that you are contaminating the workplace with politics and politics with the workplace. Using the power dynamics of the workplace to further your political agenda and allowing politics to decide who works where (which again, that is illegal under labor law of many countries not just US).
In the US as well I see this trend where leftists and rightists alike think it is a good idea to force people into their camp. If a person is on your side because you forced them, obviously their supposed views are fake. You get rid of bob, but his friend jack saw what happened to bob and will quietly try to get rid of people that disagree with hid and bob's views now. You brought political conflict to the workplace now.
Hard to focus on work, talk about the preso when, for example, people are storming our Capitol.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30601594 .
Talking about abortion will be more likely to stir up a debate than talking about the storming of the Capitol.
Banning political speech is a great step toward convincing employees to unionize, so I applaud Meta for this, though.
The tendency now it seems is for people to absolve themselves from maintaining a democratic discourse by taking a selfish absolutist position.
There will always exceptions.
The main problem is that most governments have historically shown themselves to use every possible angle they can come up with when they want to go after someone, no matter the legal stretch. Thus, collecting data that could be vital to a legitimate concern could also be later misused for other nefarious purposes. If governments would be the "bigger person" so to speak, and not stoop to dastardly levels, more people would have faith that the government would not infringe on their inherent rights without a damn good reason.
The reality is that vaccination has been a requirement to participate in society for decades. You have to be vaccinated to go to college, your children must be vaccinated to go to school. And if you want to travel countries will demand you provide proof of vaccination so that you're not a walking bag of diseases.
And I mean this genuinely: it’s wonderful that you have a Union that you can use for those purposes. Most workers in the US, particularly tech workers, don’t. The fact that you do is a testament to the effectiveness of politics in the workplace.
If it’s in your uterus, either you’ll have the option of intervening to try keeping the pregnancy going (if the doctor thinks that’s even possible), or, more likely, be sent home with painkillers and encouraging words about “trying again”.
In Texas, my home state, I would be very hesitant to make that visit, for fear it wasn’t ectopic and that I was exposing myself to, at the very least, a rather physically and psychologically invasive and expensive investigation into whether I induced the miscarriage.
I see how once the pregnancy is officially confirmed, intentionally causing a miscarriage would be scary/risky.
Are there other states doing this or is it only Texas?
Claiming that no time period was specified makes the statement true, but also makes the statement so weak that it doesn't really mean anything.
>Also, you seem to be demanding precision when you haven't even specified a threshold you would find acceptable. Is it OK for you that "merely" hundreds of women die needlessly? Instead of trying to make others chase your ever-receding goalposts, perhaps you should try making your own persuasive argument.
I already have, in my previous comment.
>2. even if you accept that there would be "deaths of thousands of young women", I doubt those deaths would sway the opinion of someone who thinks each abortion is murder (ie. 629,898 "deaths" from abortion vs "thousands" of "deaths")
That might be a good-faith argument if we were allowing eons, but we're actually talking about years to (at most) decades.
> I already have, in my previous comment.
No, not really. You've regurgitated a number, but only as an appeal to emotion. You haven't connected it to the subject of this thread, which is the idea that even a fully formed human has no right to require physical sacrifice of another. Persuasion means connecting things in a way that might sway an interlocutor, not merely bashing them over the head with claims that you find compelling.
What in the hell? I think i totally failed to communicate what i mean if took that from what i said.
I tried to say that it's a personal decision of mine to try to change my workplace if i learn that people i work with/for are completely immoral. Like, i don't wanna work with people like that. It's a personal decision. But i wouldn't want to force anyone to agree with me or anything of that sort. Sorry if it came out that way, i didn't mean to.
So at what point should abortions be regulated? 39 weeks? 24 weeks? 16 weeks? Something else?
So when I had a big early 40th birthday surprise, I went straight to my gyno for her to make sure it wasn’t going to be a repeat - especially since we already had plans to visit my family back in Texas a few weeks after that. Then, the concern was merely financial/logistical. Now…
The (mostly) happy ending: a boringly normal pregnancy that left me with lingering back pain and numbness in some toes, and the most wonderful little boy that I’d given up on having years before.
Note: Thanks both of you for engaging in a respectful conversation.
uhh what? I'm not advocating for one side or another. I'm only pointing out that if you think that aborted fetuses are "deaths", then a few extra thousand deaths pales in comparison to the number of "deaths" from abortions.
>You haven't connected it to the subject of this thread, which is the idea that even a fully formed human has no right to require physical sacrifice of another.
1. That's an nice argument and all, but it certainly wasn't in "the subject of this thread". I traversed through all the parent comments and couldn't find any comment that made an argument to that effect.
2. since we're already bringing this topic up, the obvious response I can think of would be: really? no "physical sacrifice" whatsoever? What about mask/vaccine mandates, which require some token/small amount of sacrifice? Obviously wearing something over your face/getting jabbed isn't equivalent to carrying a baby to term, but the argument (at least as you presented it) seems to take an absolutist position rather than some sort of cost-benefit analysis one.
>Persuasion means connecting things in a way that might sway an interlocutor, not merely bashing them over the head with claims that you find compelling.
Again, you seem to think I'm trying to convince people that abortions are bad. However, if you read my original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883521) more carefully, see that I'm only trying to point out that the "deaths of thousands of young women" argument isn't persuasive.
See this is the trick, the sleight-of hand - is draws you into accepting a simplistic falsehood: that a specific line has to be, should be or can be drawn.
Medicine is not law, and law is not code. Or at least, when done well they behave differently.
there is no sense in a code `if (fetus_weeks <= 16) return true else return false;` being law and then being medicine. That's 2 category errors right there.
A decision between doctor and patient based on specific circumstances is what's called for.
Pete Buttigieg said it quite well in this case:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/pete-buttigieg-shut-down-t...
Hypotheticals are a waste of time, bring an actual example or stop wasting my time
The mother takes priority up until that baby is breathing on its own. Always
And then we wonder why the pro-life crowd insists the pro-choice crowd are baby killers.
I don't care about hypotheticals that have no basis in reality just like I don't give a shit about what the founding fathers thought, who were rapist-racist-sexist-slave owners who didn't want blacks, women, or poor people to have any say. Yea the document written by them is flawless lol sure. The constitution is out dated but the clowns in government make too much money off it and keep us peasants fighting about pointless shit like abortion while they loot the country
I love how you just ignored the rest of my statement and can't bring up that example that you just know exists. Get off that clown shit and show me a real example
So where is it? These examples of abortions where the mother didn't want it at 39 weeks
Quit lying
You're making an argument for infanticide (abortions at 41 weeks <---your words) and wondering why I didn't follow the rest of your arguments?
Still waiting for that one singular example. Where are your citations for your evidence?
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/pete-buttigieg-shut-down-t...
You're asking trick questions. Proof above; "aha! that's infanticide!!" So clever.
That's also why the poster didn't respond to the person who commented about Beto. They have no real response, position, or evidence. Their only position is fake outrage at something that doesn't exist in reality
>owned and operated the Women's Medical Society Clinic, a non-compliant abortion clinic
>Gosnell was convicted of the murders of three infants who were born alive after using drugs to induce birth, was convicted of manslaughter in connection with the death of one woman during an abortion procedure, and was convicted of several other medically related crimes.[3][4][5][6][7]
This dude should never have been a doctor in the first place and this is your shining example? Brilliant
>2011, Gosnell, his wife Pearl, and eight employees were charged with a total of 32 felonies and 227 misdemeanors in connection with deaths, illegal medical services, and regulatory violations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Gosnell
I can't tell if you're a bad faith actor yourself or you just believe the nonsense put forth by the nationalist extremist party
You said it never happens, but it does. Most doctors that offer the late term abortions don't get in trouble because they're not as sloppy as him.
So the question remains, the one you refuse to answer - why would we not restrict ELECTIVE abortions after a certain point in a pregnancy? What is the argument against that? Nobody is arguing against it if they're medically necessary, I'm asking specifically about elective abortions beyond the point of viability. That's it. That's where the breakdown occurs for most people.
Sounds to me like he patients were not aware of what he was doing
And he was doing a hell of a lot more than just abortions
>The DEA, The FBI, and the Office of the Inspector General also sought a 23-count indictment charging Gosnell and seven members of his former staff with drug conspiracy relating to the practice's illegally prescribing highly-addictive painkillers and sedatives outside the usual course of professional practice and not for a legitimate medical purpose.
So again, you pick out one guy who should not have been a physician who did not inform his patient of what he was doing
And this detail is pretty important, these were not abortions but murders after birth
>They arise because of the "born alive rule", a principle of common law which stipulates that by default, for legal purposes, personhood arises – and therefore unlawful killing constituting murder becomes possible – immediately upon the victim's being born alive
Pointing this guy out is like pointing out that old veteran who's like 110 years old and smokes and drinks every day and claiming nobody gets cancer from smoking and drinking
You are aware that murder, killing people who are already born, is already illegal? These examples were not abortions, plain and simple
Only the "41 week old abortions" were treated as murder, the 39 week old ones weren't. My question is - what's the difference? In your mind, how do you justify a 39 week old elective abortion?
That's not an abortion
Not only is it derailing of a serious issue, it is deliberately visceral, disturbing, which makes it harder to debate logically about. Standard tactic: wind them up so they don't notice the inconsistencies.
And you still haven't answered - what is your logic for not having a problem with a 36, 37, 38 week etc elective abortion? What is the argument for allowing them?
