As an employer, we have a office policy that advises people to refrain from talking about religion or politics in the office place.

At first, there were two people who pushed back very very vocally to this policy and refused to abide by it. After a few warnings, one quit and the other did something inappropriate that caused us to fire her.

I was really surprised by the reaction after that. People came up to me and thanked me. It turns out those two people were an enormous distraction for everyone at work, and actively created a divisive and uncomfortable environment. They were obsessing about politics and could not stop talking about it with their peers - badgering anyone that disagreed with them. One of them even tried to use the company website and social media accounts to champion her politics.

After her termination, we discovered that she was also collecting client invoices on her desktop computer. Apparently, she had it in her head that we were secretly overcharging customers (she apparently did not understand how compound interest works) and was planning on reporting the company to the financial authorities. Note that even when you're innocent, an accusation of fraud can cause serious reputational damage as well as huge legal fees associated.

Activists are absolute poison to a company. I feel that company's efforts to placate them are usually recipes for them to backfire.

The presumption that the world can be divided in to "progressive activists" and "racists" probably has a lot to do with the reason people don't want to express diverse political opinions at work.

You either call it freedom fries, or you're with the terrorists.

Only the Sith deal in absolutes

That's exactly what a Sith would say!

love it.

So I take it you support the Uighur genocide in China, the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the current covid crisis in India, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar? Or are you doing something to actively fight against them?

These are too easy. Could we come up with conflicts where both sides are somewhat equal in power and both have a rightful claim?

Taiwan China.

North South Korea.

Kashmir.

Nagorno-Karabakh. I have not seen this much in the social media.

And just by chance you decided what ‘it’ was.

How? Most people who ride a train didn't also build that train.

There is no train.

Then what's the problem?

Evidence of managements labeling your family as inferior?

Since you don’t work there anymore you can name them or at least the company

why would you not mention if it still an issue? if you are not fight against, are you not a complicit?

I assure you I was never complicit.

The world is a big place. Many times I've seen local job ads for computer programmers that explicitly state "male only".

Where I am it is common for the hierarchy within a corporation to have a clear separation along ethnic lines, e.g. construction workers will be local, their supervisors will be from a nearby country, and the big bosses will be from another larger, wealthier country.

This is a pitch perfect example of polarization: the previous poster said "there’s too much virtue signaling at work", and now you're strongly implying that anybody who feels this way is a "racist".

It's all the news shows anymore. They could cover many other things, maybe throw in a few positive stories, but cable news and largely the whole industry is just one growing dark cloud.

Local news (small town of <35k population) in the midwest regularly covers bus crashes and other negative news from other states. States that are like 14-20 hours away.

How does that matter to me? It sucks, and it's a tragedy, but it has literally zero impact on my life.

But it sure makes good news for people to worry about.

This is why I avoid news media pretty much completely. If you study everything a few years removed you actually get a much better picture.

The problem with news media is that people have no context what so ever and often no sense of connection. Afghanistan in 2001 fell from the clear blue sky from a non existing place to being a place that can teleport people to New York. Despite it having been in the news somewhat in the 80s.

Even the people who remembered the 80s had no context of what happened in between then because nobody cared basically.

A modern example is the Syrian Civil war, if you only follow the day by the news even if you do it everyday, you actually would have very little understanding what so ever. Many of the actual facts only get relieved much later.

> the assumption that 'viewpoint diversity' is either valuable or worth cultivating on all subjects, this is not true.

Ah yes. It shouldn’t even be legal for people to question your viewpoint. Because when has discussion ever been a valuable thing? Or when has a political fashion ever turned out to be sorely wrong, and new viewpoints were needed? Wait, I remember a few times - but I’m sure that this time is going to be different.

Also, “fragile white boys”? This kind of ad hominem makes you sound like a raging ideologue.

You argued that we shouldn't always have viewpoint diversity. If you don't have viewpoint diversity you have viewpoint monoculture. There is no way this is going to happen short of enforcing it legally (even then there is going to be dissent, so you would rather need something like brainwash, which should already tell you everything about whether this is a good idea, really.)

> I have never seen _anyone_ other than a frightened white male use the term 'virtue signalling'

I think this statement is fairly telling regarding the degree to which you seem to interpret everything through your particular political lens. Together with your use of "conventional" almost as if it were an insult, and talk of "sides"/the KKK/"losing" it's like you think you're part of some revolution. I would seriously consider whether that's true.

Do you not see the irony in labeling people who politely disagree with you "members of the KKK"? Or are you just trolling?

> I will not bother to discuss racial theories with... KKK

why? there are persons who do this and have success. if you are desiring for to stop racist you must start with most racist, no? https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/18/daryl-davis-bl...

One thing I learned after 10 years of being vegetarian: antagonism is a a loosing strategy.

Shaming and tribalism doesn't help anybody, and is an arrogant view of the world.

You are probably some *ist right now, compared to a future world view.

Just because people have an opinion you know is unwise doesn't make them a bad person. They are like you. You are more like them than you think, but like them you have blind spots that prevent you from seeing it. Tolerance goes both way.

We all create suffering, at different scales and in different manners.

The idea is not to cater to racists, but just to make sure their believes does not translate to hurtful actions in the work place. If it doesn't, then it's ok, they probably tolerate stupid things on your part too.

If it does, then first, try to engage with them to make it stop.

Only if it doesn't work, should you reject them.

When I was a teenager, I had a classmate that would often point out I was eating corpses and it was gross whenever I was eating a ham sandwich.

A friend of his, liked also to point out I believed in fantasies, myths and magic, because I wasn't an atheist.

One day the pair grabbed a holy book from my closed backpack (yep, they opened it without permission), and started playing soccer with it, while saying the book was useless for anything other than being kicked.

Let's say that wasn't an winning strategy, I am still not vegetarian and still not an atheist, all they did was convince me that they are assholes.

Somewhere down the road, people that were against religious extremism took the worst example from it, like dogmatic thinking, blind faith and intolerance, and decided it was ok to use it against religious people.

Humanity and irony have a strong bond.

If it's profitable, yes.

Edit: If it's profitable we would expect to see it, not should in the moral rightness sense.

Why this is not automatically killed by bot? But the other reasonable comment by "notsureaboutpg" was? The bot is stupid.

One account is banned and the other not. There's no bot trying to decide what comments are "reasonable"—that would indeed be stupid.

Thanks for your response. I thought the one line offensive response would be easily picked by the bot. But of course I don't know how the bot works.

There is no bot, according to the moderator you're responding to.

There's software, which is probably what temp8964 meant by "bot".