I think for the people who are so passionate they can't imagine not engaging with politics at work should look for careers in NGOs. I don't feel any disdain for activists, I just don't really want to work with them, and I think we'd both be happier if they were engaged in work that had first order effects on their beliefs instead of second or third

Not necessarily work for a ngo, but volunteer for one, join a union, join the local political groups that actually make a difference locally in your community. So many options, besides the work place.

This assumes that it's an earnest desire to improve society (which it sometimes is), and not a desire to gain/maintain status or power through virtue signalling.

> a desire to gain/maintain status or power

What you're describing is basically a textbook definition of 'politics'. I find it funny that you call this virtue signalling when that term was literally invented to describe the opposite: halfhearted political activism that isn't trying to build power.

Well, the word "politics" has various connotations in general usage, and many of them don't describe the phenomenon I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is a cynical attempt at elevating one's zero-sum standing in a social group by showing conspicuous adherence to the group's purported moral orthodoxy.

This[1] is good reading on the phenomenon.

[1] https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-...

Or a job in actual politics

lol come on, that makes too much sense.

People who are passionate about something would most likely like to recruit new people to their cause. Working for an NGO is a dead end as everyone is already on the same page there.

It is also a dead end because corporations have most of the power in the country.

> What I think is lost in the conversation here is that people don’t really have organizations they can go to to advocate their political positions.

Why should workplaces serve as political-outlet therapy locations because people can't think of other organizations to use for this purpose? There are, in fact, countless numbers of political organizations and groups in the U.S. and you are free to start your own if you don't like anything on offer. The idea that you a company should cater to your other non-work desires such as baptism or finding a loved one or expressing your personal angst about some topic just because you're there and it's convenient doesn't make much sense. Yes, political activism takes time and you may not have time to go to a meeting after work or on weekends. That doesn't mean you can turn your workplace into a church or other political-therapy group.

I think this is a side effect of American obsession with work. We really build our identities and lives around our jobs, and our corporations want and expect is to be there all the time.

Yes, I think you are right. Americans work long hours, they spend far too much time at work, and many view work as something that should give them personal fulfillment. Combine that with a right-to-work situaion and a lot of people are investing too much into what is basically a profit-maximizing enterprise instead of a charity or social group.

Some people it turns out, don't want "political-outlet therapy", they want to build actual political power. When you work for a company that already has that sort of power, activism like this is a natural approach. In fact, I suspect that many people dislike this approach because they know it is effective.

I think that's OP's point.

When I see a Jehovah’s Witness coming up to my door, I pretend to not be home. I’d really hate to be forced to have that same feeling at work, but be unable to escape it. If you can’t do your job without evangelizing your coworkers in some form or fashion, maybe you should reconsider your career choices.

You are halfway there, but now think a bit further. Imagine if you were working at a job, but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspects of your culture, making fun of names that are similar to your own name, or similar to names of your friends and family.

You can't escape these immature people because you need to work the job with them in order to make money. So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously, in fact their response is "hey let's not get all political about this".

Don't you see how people making racist jokes can be just as annoying as a pushy religious person? There's a lot of ways humans do annoying things to each other, but we should all be working on ways to minimize the amount we are annoying each other, and sometimes that means facing up to the fact that something you are doing is racist towards another person and you have to stop it.

From the looks of it, everyone quickly agreed that this list was inappropriate and it was shut down promptly. The drama didn't start over that, but exaggerated claims people made such as "this is the road to genocide", as well as connecting this list to some mass-shooting, as well as some lingering conflicts such as whether or not the title "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" – a book published by basecamp – is ableist or not.

People act like "haha, this name sounds funny because it's similar to the English word [...]" is a huge deal and existential threat. It's ... not really. It's just inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that making fun of your customers for any reason is not a good idea. People seem to have lost perspective here.

DHH tried to inject some nuance, and paid the price it seems :-/ All this incident has accomplished is turning off people, in spite of clearly being sympathetic to it to the important bits of social justice.

The social justice movement is eating itself from the inside out with stuff like this.

Making fun of a culture is culturalist, not racist. And all cultures have aspects worthy of mockery.

And making fun of names doesn't even rise to that level. No one thinks less of a culture or a person just because their name reads like "fuck", or "Biggus Dickus", etc., in English. It's just a funny impedance mismatch between languages.

You aren't making the point you think you are. All you are doing is showing that you lack empathy for how others feel. And that is the fundamental problem: it isn't about what you think you are doing, it is about what other people think you are doing, and the fact that what you think is funny is offensive to other people.

I have empathy for people who experience prejudice, but not for people who think "this name means something funny in English" is racist. Those people don't know what racism means, and they devalue claims of actual racism when they say that.

There can definitely be a racist undertone to jokes about "this name means something funny in English" - it is often rooted in the idea that "this person doesn't belong", "these people aren't like us" etc. Furthermore (and as a completely separate issue), people who are already racist always latch onto these kinds of jokes to strengthen and justify their beliefs, which should be in itself a reason not to make those kinds of jokes.

It's very small in comparison to more serious examples - perhaps it's even the smallest possible example of problematic behavior - but it is problematic nonetheless.

That's literally the point that the Basecamp employees were trying to make in a relatively benign way before their leadership overreacted.

Would you see a racist undertone in putting "Rod Johnson" or "Dick Fuller" on a list like this? Would you claim the humor comes from those people not belonging? Because I would bet anything that the list would have such names.

I would also bet anything that names like "Vinh Ng" or "Ravi Chakrabarti" aren't on that list. Because those names aren't funny in English. Because they don't mean anything in English. So there's no impedance mismatch.

I know it's popular these days to claim racism all the time, but there's no actual basis for it here.

The articles about the issue clearly state that the list in question contained examples that mocked Asian and African names, so your comment is moot in this context.

Sorry, I'll make it clearer for you: the metric for being on the list is "sounds funny in English", not cultural origin. Thus there will be names from all different cultures, but for any given culture, most names won't be on the list.

Edit: according to this article,

"Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable."

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...

So really, the people practicing cultural discrimination were the ones who were ok with the list so long as only European names were in it.

You are Gish-galloping at this point. Yes, Anglo-Americans making fun of Anglo American names is not racist, nor is a group of people exclusively joking about names from their own culture. But that’s not the situation here.

Jokes that begin more innocently can turn racist; happens all the time. It’s best not to allow them to turn in that direction by including the types of jokes that racists always love to latch on due to an element of plausible deniability.

If people took all the mental energy they expended in being apologists for inappropriate behavior and simply applied it to finding ways to enjoy time with others that don’t have all these issues, none of this would ever be a problem.

A Gish gallop involves many points. Mine is singular: a list of names that sound funny in English is not racist.

If a racist enjoys the list, that does not make it racist. Racists also eat toast. That does not make toast racist.

If people took all the mental energy they expended in labeling things as racist, and simply applied it to finding ways to enjoy time with people who don’t have all these issues, none of this would ever be a problem.

Respectfully - if we become so afraid of one another, or of enabling racists, that we stop trying to enjoy humor, share our culture, or just be authentic humans together, then the racists win.

This argument reminds me of a similar one: students, who when caught plagiarizing, defend themselves by saying "well, there were no other combination of words that could express the idea in question." However, in analyzing the situation, you find that there are thousands or possibly millions of different sentences that express the same thought that would not be considered plagiarisms of each other. There is simply no excuse; you can always come up with a unique way to write ideas in your own words.

Similarly, we have unlimited methods to share culture and humor in ways that don't involve backhandedly belittling others and which don't include feeding racism as a side effect.

That's the thing though, it doesn't matter whether you think something is "actual racism". It matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent. And making fun of people's names is absolutely racism adjacent. It dehumanizes the person on the receiving end by treating one of their fundamental self identifiers as a joke. It may not dehumanize them to the same degree as a slur, an offensive stereotype, "blackface", or similar, but it is absolutely dehumanizing. I listened to people who have been on the receiving end, and I believe them when they say that this hurts them and offends them. Is it as bad as some other forms of racism? Arguably no. But is it on the spectrum of racism? Absolutely.

This is what empathy looks like: you listen to the one on the receiving end and you believe what they say about how they feel. At the end of the day you have the right to decide that this isn't "actual racism" in your own mind, but that doesn't change the reality that the one on the receiving end still feels bad.

> It [only] matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent.

That's where I can't agree. It's possible to do something that feels "racist" to someone but isn't actually racist. If I'm wrong, then there's no objective definition of racism and we can all go home and call it "lack of empathy". You can't have it both ways. Either racism is objectively definable or it isn't.

Categorically speaking, there is a big difference between offending someone's feelings or sensibilities and committing an act of racism, which is defined as discrimination on the basis of race and is objectively measurable using well-established tests.

Let me use an analogy:

Imagine that you are walking by someone and accidentally elbow them in the ribs. They double over in pain, and exclaim loudly that you hurt them really bad and you should apologize. Now you could get defensive and say "Well I didn't mean to elbow you in the ribs, it wasn't on purpose so I did nothing wrong" and "Also getting elbowed in the ribs isn't actually that painful, there's no reason to make a scene about it."

But what you don't realize is this person was in a car accident last week, and below their shirt their ribs are broken. Your elbow just hit them on a sensitive bruise and jostled a broken rib. Your unintentional action was actually extremely hurtful. By protesting that you didn't do anything to hurt them you are just looking like a jerk. All it would have taken was an "I'm sorry, I'll be more careful" and it probably would have been fine.

This is similar to what racism and the effects of racism are: there are people who have suffered trauma from heinous acts. As a result they are already in a wounded state, and something "not racist" in your mind can still hurt because it pokes in the same place as the "actual racism". Just like you can't accurately judge whether someone is actually in physical pain and how much physical pain they are in, you can't always tell how much your action hurts someone emotionally.

In both cases the empathetic and moral thing to do is to believe the person in pain who says that your actions are hurtful.

This is not at all similar.

The correct analogy would be if the person I accidentally elbowed claimed I was physically assaulting them, which I of course would deny.

Racism is a very extreme call-out and it is no wonder that people defend against it. It is no matter of believing that I hurt the person, I do. But I am defending myself from an attack I believe is unproportional,and actually leaves no choice but to defend myself. Call it insensitive instead of racist and people are far more likely to listen.

You're not "the person in pain" though. You are pretending to speak for them.

In fact, one could say it's racist that you're feeling entitled to appropriate their pain when you claim to speak for them. Your racism is hurting me, and will continue to hurt me until you acknowledge that racism necessarily involves discrimination based on race, and that it's wrong and problematic of you to appropriate the actual suffering of others.

And you are assuming that people who are hurt don't want allies to take up their hurts. Some people can only win with allies, and that means people who don't share the same hurts taking them up as burdens of their own anyway.

And you know, democracy is all about coalition building.

An ally should take up the hurts of others, but not make up the hurts of others.

Ever heard of narcissistic injury?

When it comes to hurt feelings, it's not always the fault of the speaker. Some emotional pain is completely fabricated for egoic or malicious reasons, or is simply mistaken.

If you hit me I cannot feel 'murdered'.

Murder has a definition, which is precisely why we can do something about it.

I'm not arguing against empathy for those who have been hurt by past acts of racism. We consider it normal and healthy to be careful and sensitive around those who have PTSD or the like from real offenses committed against them in the past. But to fail to be empathetic and thus re-open an emotional wound is not in the same category as the original offense, however bad such a lack of empathy may be.

You're making several categorical errors in your posts. We have to be careful to speak and think with precision. "The truth will set you free" and "the tongue of the wise brings healing"; but logical fallacies only muddy the water, and vague accusations stir up strife.

It sounds like you think I’m defending the dumb list. I’m not. To me, it sounds like the Basecamp leadership did mostly the right thing. They said, this list shouldn’t exist, we expect better in the future. But also, we’re sick and tired of people making extreme assumptions about people’s motivations and making this list tantamount to a KKK membership. The list was dumb. Calling the list the work of hateful racists was also probably dumb.

> So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously

Far from the truth. How did you surmise that this is what happened? They took it very seriously - the CEO wrote up a whole long postmortem on what happened, why it was a failure of management, and shouldn't happen again, admitting fault for not stepping in to deal with it sooner.

The portrayal of a whole spectrum of ethical questions as "religious" is the most bad faith interpretation I see deployed basically all the time in these types of discussions. It's practically a senseless meme at this point.

We're literally talking about people keeping a list of names they thought were funny that lead to the situation, which apparently enough people internally found offensive, and you have people in this thread talking about "professionalism" and "religious thinking"; what?

> but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspects of your culture, making fun of names that are similar to your own name, or similar to names of your friends and family

That is resolved with the manager, and if not, with hr.

So combining both halves it seems like people can't actually get along and the idea of a patchwork quilt society is a horrible, dystopian failure?

What are the other options for people to push political opinions nowadays? Corporations are the power brokers today

Anywhere else. A company can't be the political voice of its employees without taking it away.

Employees doing activism through the company are not doing activism, they are delegating it at seemingly no cost to them.

Please don't equate human rights activism to a religious movement.

I’ve had two particularly obnoxious coworkers in my career. One on the left and one on the right. Their behavior was indistinguishable from that of a religious zealot. They were extremely unpleasant people, and no one should have to listen to them while on the clock.

I didn’t say anything about human rights activism. I drew a parallel between religious zealotry and political zealotry in the workplace that I have personally experienced. And the parallel is perfectly apt.

Horseshoe theory of political orientation. It's very true. Personality types of left and right wing zealots overlap tremendously (inclination towards authoritarianism etc)

I always thought it’s more of a donut (call it a torus if you want to sound smart) than a horseshoe.

I like that label because it has a "stupid" connotation to it.

I'd lean that they are equivalent. Both are all about espousing what the right way to be a human is, and more specifically have strong opinions about the wrong way to be a human

Historically, religion and human rights activism are closely conjoined. Anthropologically, religious proselytization and ideological activism are nearly indistinguishable phenomena.

Religious evangelists believe they are literally saving your soul.

Which is part of what makes them annoying as hell. If they want to do that, let them first prove -- to my intellectual satisfaction, not theirs -- that I have a "soul" to be "saved" in the first place.

Why not?

There are non-profit organizations or similar private organizations that are better suited for political activity. The workplace is not the correct place. I was also harassed by the "silence is complicit" attitude. Some other employees I work with would go up to me and ask me questions like "we want to know where you stand on xyz political issue".....and I'm like.....it is really none of your business. They then take that response as you "being part of the problem" and then start going after you personally. Like who the heck does that? Especially to coworkers.

> Some other employees I work with would go up to me and ask me questions like "we want to know where you stand on xyz political issue".....and I'm like.....it is really none of your business. They then take that response as you "being part of the problem" and then start going after you personally.

These people are totalitarians.

Yeah, this is textbook totalitarianism. People think totalitarianism is about dictatorship, but it isn’t: it’s about public policy dominating every part of one’s being, removing any personal or private space.

Forcing people to declare for this or that cause is absolutely totalitarian. It can be done with the best of intentions, but it’s still a unhealthy way of going about things.

That's psychopathic behavior.

Man, I'd report that the HR as a hostile work environment.

> What I think is lost in the conversation here is that people don’t really have organizations they can go to to advocate their political positions. [...] The workplace is one of the few places where they can feel like they’re having an impact, but that’s not really appropriate.

Politics is how groups of humans decide the distribution of power between themselves. It should be completely unsurprising that there is corporate politics around what power employees have within a company. Your claim that it isn't appropriate for employees to engage in corporate politics is a deeply political statement and just means that you think all the power within a company should be wielded by someone else. You are entitled to that position just as others are allowed to engage in collective action (also just politics) to achieve a different distribution of power.

I'd also add that it is weird how we live in a society where everyone acknowledges corporations have significant power over our government, yet people seem to be surprised that individuals working for them want a say in how those corporations operate (which would by extension grant influence over the government).

"Workplace is inappropriate for politics" is a really ahistorical stance to take. All the things that you enjoy nowadays (8 hr work day, 5 day work week, no child labour, etc) came about as a result of organized politics at the workplace.

There's a difference between being completely apolitical in the workplace and being engaging in 24/7 political advocacy that infects every single issue you touch. I used to work with a guy who was a devout Christian. He would wear his cross, and everyone once in a while would say something like, "with God's blessing". That's okay. He didn't construct an altar next to the cash register and give sermons while zealously trying to convert every customer and employee and demand that we tithe 10% to the church. If he did that, we would have told him that it his behavior was not appropriate for work. It wouldn't matter how passionately he believed in his religion, or how critical he insisted it was that everyone was "saved". Its just not appropriate behavior for the workplace.

Do you feel good initiatives require someone to be political to be apart of?

Watered down a bit more... do you believe someone can be a good person without affiliating with a group in order to do it?

That's very odd to me... Similar in vein to self-studied engineers/academics vs those who need a college group of peers to do it.

Politics is not “Dems vs Republicans” or “Tory vs Labour”. All the aforementioned improvements came from organized workers protesting against their bosses. That is politics.

Nope. Those are all the results of laws which came from politically elected officials who made policy.

None of my employers limited work hours or work days or children at work because of political discourse in the office. Nor did historical companies from 3 generations ago when such laws were passed.

All of those laws were created because companies did NOT implement such limits.

Who do you think convinced the politicians to make it happen? Lobbyists? (Ha.) It came out of labor movements! Strikes and walkouts! In 1867 workers shut down the entire Chicago economy for a week! (Congress then passed an 8-hour law in 1868, but that was just one step along the way.)

Educate yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_young_people%27s_r...

https://www.timesizing.com/history-of-the-american-workweek/

It's extremely ironic to read this on the international workers day, May 1st.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day

People died so you can have an 8 hour workday, and they organized in the workplace.

>All of those laws were created because companies did NOT implement such limits.

Many of the 'work standards' laws (including child labor laws) were actually enforcing standards and best-practices which originated from industry leaders. One example is how the mechanized textile manufacturers eliminated child labor (as it was unnecessary and uneconomical), then lobbied governments to ban child labor (probably to 'punish' their competitors). The 40-hour work week (largely) originated at various industry-leaders (notably including Ford, which was very efficient, and preferred energetic and loyal workers over tired and seasonal ones).

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs...

If by "industry leaders" you mean unionized workers, then sure.

Ford was not unionized when they moved to the 40-hour work week, and the textile mills weren't unionized when they eliminated child labor.

No, but movements for minimum age limits in industry began in unions in the mid 1800s, and the Democratic party adopting a pro-minimum-age law stance was due to pressure from Unions.

Similarly, the push for 8 hour workdays began with union support in the mid 1800s, 50+ years before Ford popularized it (and in fact it was due to this pressure that public sector employees had 8-hour workdays as early as 1869).

Individual states had banned child labor and passed 8-hour workday laws (due to union and public pressure) far before Ford or the Textile mills did so "voluntarily".

A lot of these policies seem like they'd violate NLRA/NLRB rules, as well.

People have plenty of places they can express their political opinions. They can go to rallies, canvass for candidates, phonebank, volunteer, etc. etc. And all those would actually make a difference! I think people just like complaining, don’t like working, and have identified in politics something that they can use to loaf that is “virtuous.”

Can't agree more with this.

As I commented in other thread, here in europe this is very uncommon. Here we go to work, to work. Football and politics don't lead to good ends anywhere.

So, join any company outside to the US if you want to focus on work

It actually very much depends on what you mean by “work”. Go work in a European factory, and you’ll probably have to have a relationship with a union, which includes going to meetings and discussing causes. European offices, on the other hand (and particularly in the private sector), tend to follow the traditional “politics and salaries are taboo” culture, probably because those areas never required unionization to improve their working conditions.

>People don’t really have organizations they can go to to advocate their political positions.

>[People] need an outlet to push the ideas and causes they care about

>I like that people want to express themselves and improve the world we live in, but they need to find a better place to do that.

Political parties & elections are instruments designed to do just that. It's actually mildly alarming that people are so jaded they forget about these (?).

The US parties aren't really a place to express yourself. They are highly corrupt. It would be nice if the US system allowed for smaller parties to be viable.

> I’d hate to go into work and be harassed about being “silent is complicit” (which seems like it was one of the major drivers of the change)

What is the source for this?

The original "Changes at Basecamp" post banning political discussion: "You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit"

Given what else we have learned about what went down from Casey Newton I would not believe things from the original post without a second source.

I agree, and I think the mechanism that causes people to feel this way is, people are angry about a system that has failed to be equal, and work feels like part of "the system", so people feel as though a change at work will somehow change the system at large. And there's some truth to that.

I took a residency test for Germany recently, and some basic knowledge about how to participate in the political system was required. In NRW where I live, we have a "Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung", or state center for political education. People can go there (or the website) to educate themselves on and discuss current topics, and also learn how to participate in the system itself (through citizen initiatives, etc.). I thought it was pretty amazing that this was required knowledge for living here! If we had anything like this in California, I never heard about it growing up there.

FYI, There's a zillion local orgs for political parties, policy, advocacy, volunteering, etc. But since they're mostly volunteer run, they're mostly discovered word of mouth.

I tried twice to start a study group based on the book Becoming a Citizen Activist. Focus more on the how, vs the what. I haven't yet figured out how to make it self-sustaining. I'm not sure it's possible.

This “silent is complicit” angle is positively poisonous.

Doing any work fundamentally pushes some political view. Mostly today it's neoliberalism in some form.

I think an obvious alternative is to expect employees to actually support neoliberalism as a job qualification.

Same as if you were working for an evangelical church, you'd expect people to try and convert everyone to Christianity

say what? Someone cleaning houses, or working as a cashier is pushing political views? Is a McDonalds worker putting 'big beef' industry ideology forward?

Most jobs have nothing to do with politics as most people don't have a true choice/luxury to be choose. Often people have to work, or starve/be homeless.

Most jobs out there are not political. That includes building a simple email client.