simonpenn

I agree with you that this statement, on its own, does not imply all men are like that.

However, the following concerns apply

1) I as a (non-bigoted) white man do not trust the good faith of the person speaking (in context, at Google)

2) I have seen analogous comments about eg. black people be auto-interpreted as bad faith when context made it clear that it was not bad-faith.

3) The inclusion of "white" and "man" in that statement are unnecessary, so them being included in spite of that is a signal of bad faith.

I would like to work in a place where everyone is intelligent and good-faith enough to interpret this sentence in its reasonable sense. But the reality is that such a place doesn't exist. At best I can get a place where statements against white men as a group get this treatment, but statements against other groups will always be interpreted as bad-faith, regardless of context.

I would like for all ambiguous statements like this to be interpreted on the same standard, but as long as they will not be, the next best step is to err on the side of caution and have a blanket ban of things like this

Shortly after Trump was elected, there was a major problem in work Slack where people upset at the outcome would make undirected threats of physical violence in #general. After about a week of it, I was able to get it to stop by commenting on it something like: I don't think it's appropriate to make threats of physical violence in logged work chat. Tech companies get sued for things like bullshit patent infringements all the time, and it would be very damaging to the company for this to ever come out in discovery"

Fortunately, this comment made them stop (or move to a private channel, who knows). But the fact that they were making these comments for a week was rather shocking to me. Nobody involved seemed to think there was anything wrong with saying that you would, quote, "beat in the face of the nearest Trump voter" in a work chat room with ~1000 members

The goal of most people in a workplace is very much _not_ to have an actual discussion and change minds.

If an individual who I have never met before approaches me wearing a pin that says "kill all men", it is not my responsibility to understand the years of philosophy reading that have caused them to express a totally reasonable and nuanced perspective in very easily misunderstood words. It is 100% reasonable for me to expect that those words mean what they say, and not some other, more subtle meaning that I am unaware of.

Even if this is actually true! Even if it is actually true that "kill all men" expands into this reasonable position. Because I have no access to what goes on inside someone else's head. All I have access to is what I see.

And when I, a man, see a person with management authority over me, wearing a pin that says 'kill all men', I get scared. This is not appropriate for a workplace, no moreso than any white supremacist garbage is.

I've worked under an HR staff member who had this pin on her bag. I lived, and that job was good enough, but the thought was always in the back of my mind: what if I piss her off some day and she falls back on her prejudices + her position to make my life miserable?

I would support a blanket ban on all things like that _in the workplace_.