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[–]Lilith_Fair 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

So let me ask you this: will you go to bat for the Catholic Schools currently being sued by gays and lesbians employees who they terminated due to the employees' refusal to adhere to Catholic teachings and beliefs? Because in these cases it goes beyond branding. There's a conflict of civil rights vs. freedom of religion here.

I think the examples you brought up are very specific cases where the employer has a certain set of principles to which they publicly advocate. Therefore, in those cases the employee who act in ways that contradict their principles would essentially be "not doing their jobs". Their terminations would not be an issue of free speech, but an issue of performing a job they were hired to do. In contrast in cases where say, Nike terminates a lowly retail sales person at a store for retweeting JK Rowling, there is nothing that hinders the sales person's ability to perform her job. She should not be fired for speech that has nothing to do with her job. Nike firing her would simply be a matter of choosing to be carpetbegger for one currently trendy segment of consumers. Nothing to do with Nike's brand image in reality, even if one argues that retaining the employee makes Nike look "transphobic". I'd argue that no, it does not. We should never get to a point where companies and employees should be held accountable for a single employee who is not its representative voice. It so, multinational corporations with hundreds of thousands of workers will never be able to operate. That or every one of the hundreds of thousands of workers, even those in foreign countries with cultures and values different from ours, will all have to be put at risk of being fired at the whim of some cultural morality dictators. (And really there are already isolated incidents of this, including some I believe to be hoaxes by those with ideological agenda.)

As for our sub silencing voices--I'm sorry that is not true in spirit and it's a straw man. if we weren't silenced EVERYWHERE and we can openly talk about our GC views on mainstream platforms and ask questions, we probably wouldn't need this sub in the first place. Or we may still have this sub but there'd be no need to keep it for women only. The reason we need this is because we have nowhere else where we're not shut down or shouted down. What's more, the people who started GC had been super accommodating in finding ways to let those they keep out have a way to speak, including starting subs specifically for that. They've gone out of their ways to provide platforms for people to question and debate us. Do the TRAs, MRAs, Libfems, etc done anything like that for us? Have they?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I am unsure as to why you felt it was necessary to bring up your counter example. It has nothing to do with this, it is a strawman. Someone speaking about social issues in the settings of the letter are often not civil rights vs. freedom of religion. Often they are publishing something, writing something, that makes the publishers look bad in the public eye due to the public opinion of their readers.

When\where did someone, who worked at Nike as a retail sales person, get fired for retweeting JK Rowling? I want to know when/where this happened. Also this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the argument in the letter. The argument in the letter is specifically about protecting high profile people's livelihoods. There is nothing about protecting the lowly retail people. It has everything to do with protecting writers, publishers, journalists, etc.

We aren't silenced EVERYWHERE. We aren't silenced here. We aren't silenced on YouTube. We aren't silenced on Spinster. We aren't silenced on many platforms. And again, we can cancel Reddit through our actions. We can bring the rise of a better platform through our actions.

[–]Lilith_Fair 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My counter example is not a straw man. The situations are analogous as both are about whether an employee can be fired by an employer for something that directly contradicts the employer's stated principles. What I'm pointing out is that your examples of journalists working for certain publishers, in my view, is not about the employees' speech, but rather, their performing their jobs. You positioned it as an issue of employees' right to speak. I feel there's a distinction from speech, and I see it as an issue of whether the employee is not performing the job by being opposed to what the organization is about.

The Nike example is a hypothetical. But this is what cancel culture is all about. Cancel culture is not limited only to being about whether journalists can speak. It's about whether anybody can speak their minds in the present environment. Perhaps you read the letter to be only about protecting writers, publishers, and journalists, or high profile people's livelihood. I didn't read it that way. I read it as being about cancel culture that is terrorizing the whole society. The Letter didn't address only speech and press, it specifically included criticisms stating: "censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty."

Note the quoted part "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism." My Nike example is a hypothetical example to illustrate exactly this.

If you want some real life examples, here's an Atlantic article that reported and discussed at length of some private citizens, non-writers, whose lives had been ruined by cancel culture. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/

And after the Letter was published, one of the signers, Matt Yglesias, had a transgender co-worker who went right to their employer to complain that "she" now feels "unsafe". Yglesias didn't even sign on to anything that contradicts their employer's mission. It was merely something he did as an expression of an opinion that now is being casted as making someone "unsafe". Could my hypothetical example not happen too if a co-worker of the retail staffer complains about "feeling unsafe" because the retail worker retweeted JK Rowling? Yglesias was the real life example of that, and the people in the Atlantic article. Those are just a few examples. In the last few years, lot of people have been having their livelihoods taken away for expressing "wrong think".

The Letter was signed by high profile people not just to protect their own livelihood. I believe many of them signed it to speak for little people who had become victims of cancel culture but have no platforms or any power at all to seek redress. I'm not the only one who think this either.

You're free to disagree with me. Apparently we read the Letter differently. The current cancel culture is no different than McCarthyism. Further, there's no path to redemption. The punishment and ramifications are too high a price to demand of people and the self-appointed morality police on Twitter should not have the kind of power they currently hold. Therefore I can't support it. If you decided you support it, then I respectfully disagree and I'll be standing by this who want it to stop.