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Re:Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings by manigandham on Saturday November 16, 2019 @06:16PM (#21555547)
This is again conflating politics with office policies. A workplace is not the state. You don't have carte blanche to act how you want, especially when it will clearly create chaos at the company's expense. And it's not specific views but entire topics.

Since you want it explicit:

1) Contracts are not office policy. Objecting because of politics is political.

2) Hiring is about getting the best people for the job. Discussing that is fine. Using quotas for race and gender instead of character and competence is identity politics, and thus political.

3) Bathrooms are by sex. Anyone with different needs can negotiate themselves or use single-person bathrooms if available. Discussing it is political.

None of that is relevant to the business doing work. It's political BS, and you're free to start your own company and discuss all you want there to see how that goes.

Re:Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings by joshuamorton on Saturday November 16, 2019 @06:34PM (#21555623)
> 1) Contracts are not office policy. Objecting because of politics is political.

You're the one claiming the objection is political. I claim the objections are ethical. Again, if you are the arbiter of what is or is not political (which it seems you are trying to be), all this ends up is "objections to things I dislike are political and forbidden".

> Hiring is about getting the best people for the job. Discussing that is fine. Using quotas for race and gender instead of character and competence is identity politics, and thus political.

Great! Racial or gender based hiring quotas are illegal in the US. I don't support them. So which companies do you think are actively and brazenly breaking the law by using illegal hiring quotas? Or are you perhaps just saying that hiring policies you personally disagree with are "political"?

> Bathrooms are by sex.

This may be office policy where you work, but it is not always office policy. Are you saying that it can't be discussed? Because you just said that discussing office policies are relevant to work.

> You can discuss and protest the latter if you want, but not the former.

Now you seem to be walking back that statement. Which is is? Again, it seems that "political" things are just things you disagree with, this is an intellectually dishonest position and one that I'm asking that you reconsider.

Re:Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings by manigandham on Saturday November 16, 2019 @09:47PM (#21556254)
You asked and I told you exactly what is political or not, and none of those things are about me disagreeing. Again you're confusing views with topics. If you disagree with every definition because you think everything is political then there's no rational discussion to be had. This is what the activists do. Make everything political without boundaries.

By the way, Google is undergoing lawsuits about race and gender discrimination with explicit documentation, as are many other companies and universities in the US.

Re:Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings by joshuamorton on Saturday November 16, 2019 @10:13PM (#21556338)
I asked you if office policies were political. You said no (or that they could be discussed anyway). I asked about some specific office policies, you claimed they were all political and couldn't be discussed. They're clearly office policies, because different offices have different policies on them.

Your continued inability to provide a consistent definition of politics and banned discussion only reinforces my initial claim: you're using politics as a catch-all to justify banning discussion you have personal ideological objections to, even when those topics are related to day to day working conditions. I'm not picking a definition of political, I'm saying you've been inconsistent with yours.

Google, at any given time, is sued for discrimination against men and women and against conservatives and liberals. What's important is the merit, which most don't have. On the other hand, banning people from discussing it requesting changes to employee bathroom policy probably falls under broad protections of PCA, and would be illegal.