The Gaming Den

I kind of agree with Kaelik here. Until asshole does something assholish at work, he shouldn't be fired just because he's an asshole. Like, if when I was managing a Halloween store, I had an employee I knew to be a white supremacist, with WS tattoos all over their arms, that wouldn't be a reason to fire them. But if they started berating jewish or black customers, that would. Just because someone is an asshole in their personal life, or does shitty things away from work, doesn't mean they should be fired. I'd hate to be fired just because I'm an asshole online, and I don't think there's really any level of asshole someone can be that justifies firing them when they haven't done anything at work that is assholish.

edit: on the other hand, if the hypothetical white supremacist committed a crime away from work that I happened to know about, I would definitely report that to police and provide any assistance I could. ...maybe short of facilitating him being arrested at my actual store, since that could conceivably put innocents in harms way.

If a white supremacist can somehow coexist with black employees and customers then whatever I guess?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I recognize how unlikely that situation actually is, and if I guy has fucking swastikas tattooed on his arms, then no amount of politesse is going to prevent customers from balking. But absent actual behavioural issues, I wouldn't fire the guy. If he could keep his racism to himself and not actively cause problems, I'd start with just asking he cover the tattoos at work.

That's what bothers me here. I'm not really gleeful about the jackass probably losing his job. Ambivalent, I guess in the word.

The workplace is actually within their legal rights--well, here in a "right-to-work" state where you can legally be fired for anything at any time--to fire him. Some employers do demand a level of professional conduct away from the job, too. This guy, it turns out, was a car salesman, so he -would- be directly interacting with the public and if the contract, employee handbook, or whatever equivalent they had forbade this kind of ass-showing, then, yeah, they wouldn't even get a wrongful termination suit (which are still possible even in R-T-W shitsville. My own job, the company promises to not fire people except for disciplinary problems, so if I got fired because they didn't like my haircut they'd face a wrongful termination suit.)

I'm just not 100% this is worth his life upended up. I dunno. It seems to be dying down now

Call down the thunder, reap the whirlwind, Maxus.

Was the asshole in question consistently berating/affecting the child as well? Because if a Little League coach is talking shit to the kids as well as the parents, then that is affecting his job performance. If not, it's still unprofessional as fuck, but it's not deliberately harming his work, if that makes any sense?

Dude should probably get stomped out, but technically he's within his rights to say horrible shit to people (as long as it does not cross over into physical abusive action).

SlyJohnny wrote:No, I completely get that and agree, but when you semi-publicly make racist declarations or make aggressive statements about the mentally disabled with a listed employment to a company, and then your statements get publicised and the company decides "you know what, maybe we won't go to bat in the press for some racist cashier we can easily replace, and in not doing so we'll create a better corporate culture (and also not lose business)" I think that's fair enough.

Except that's complete bullshit on every level.

a) You don't get a better corporate culture, your corporate culture is by definition the same if they haven't done anything at work.

b) You don't lose sales because of a stupid internet lynch mob that shouldn't have existed in the first place. If Wal Mart boycotts based on the fact that they use goddam slave labor to keep their products cheap doesn't stick, why the fuck would "some guy who works at some walmart, probably not in your town, said something racist on the internet." be an actual issue?

Maxus wrote:Some employers do demand a level of professional conduct away from the job, too. This guy, it turns out, was a car salesman, so he -would- be directly interacting with the public and if the contract, employee handbook, or whatever equivalent they had forbade this kind of ass-showing, then, yeah, they wouldn't even get a wrongful termination suit.

1) I'm obviously not saying it's illegal, because stupid fucking right to work states exist. I'm saying what should be the case.

2) This is my point though, like 99.999% of jobs should not require a level of professional conduct away from work. Being a Car Salesman who talks to people is totally a bullshit reason to fire someone who said something when they are not at work, because for fucks sake, your actual job is to lie and pretend as a car salesman, so you were going to fake a personality anyway, you might as well fake a non racist one.

Mask_De_H wrote:Call down the thunder, reap the whirlwind, Maxus.

Was the asshole in question consistently berating/affecting the child as well?

The way I understand it, the sequence is like this:

1) A, the mother of of the Down Syndrome child and an older, typical needs child, was at a Little League game. B, the mother of a couple of typical needs children, including one toddler/infant, is also there.

2) Down Syndrome girl, she's...four, I think now, she loves babies. And kids shorter than her. She sees the stroller. Before A can stop her, she runs over to B and her child to look at the baby.

3) B, she sees this child running for her full-blast and somehow comes to the conclusion that this special-needs child is about to attempt to injure her own child. She takes defensive action and either grabbed the Down Syndrome kid roughly or knocked her down, one. Reports unclear. Down Syndrome girl begins crying.

4) A catches up, and is a bit sharp about B handling her child in such a way.

5) B replies in a very snide fashion about the Down Syndrome child and accuses A of being unable to control her/irresponsible/drunk/etc.

6) One of A's berserk buttons is somehow commenting on her child as if she's defective.

7) Argument starts, it stops. For some reason, they continue it on text messages later.

8) B's husband becomes aware, and engages A, also on text messages.

9) A, by this point, is in full-on "TO THE DEATH" mode. She lights into the husband.

10) Then the text series happens as seen above.

11) A makes facebook posts, it gets shared ~300 times that I'm aware of, people take up the cause, B's husband will now have to go find a cave to hide out on. Except we're on good ol' sedimentary Gulf Coast and the nearest caves are hundreds of miles away.

That... makes everything worse.

Kaelik wrote:If Wal Mart boycotts based on the fact that they use goddam slave labor to keep their products cheap doesn't stick, why the fuck would "some guy who works at some walmart, probably not in your town, said something racist on the internet." be an actual issue?

Because the former requires a coordinated sacrifice on the part of tens (or even hundreds) of millions of people and the latter requires clicking the share button on twitter. Wal Mart can be reliably trusted to address your grievances if and only if your grievances are cheap to address, so it is a bajillionty times easier to convince them to fire and replace a cashier than it is to convince them to not use slave labor, and that means one is a feasible goal for an uncoordinated mob and the other is basically never going to happen without a legislative effort.

But yeah, social media mob justice is an uncomfortable topic. On the one hand, it's probably a good thing that corporations have to think twice before hiring a CEO who has openly funded discriminatory anti-LGBT legislation. Having your upper management be full of bigoted shitbags almost certainly will seep into the corporate culture as either institutional apathy or outright discrimination. On the other hand, just this week Microsoft had to take down their twitter-based chatbot because a bunch of shitbags decided it would be funny to teach it to say racist bullshit.

It is definitely not the safest of mechanisms by which to dispense justice, but unfortunately still somewhat of an important one.

Maxus wrote:6) One of A's berserk buttons is somehow commenting on her child as if she's defective.

Maybe her berserk button is being fucking assholes? I mean, I'm going to be charitable and assume she's aware her child is defective, but that doesn't mean people have to be assholes about it by calling the kid names or making shitty comments about how she's defective for no reason except to harass a Downsyndrome kid/her mother.

DSMatticus wrote:

Kaelik wrote:If Wal Mart boycotts based on the fact that they use goddam slave labor to keep their products cheap doesn't stick, why the fuck would "some guy who works at some walmart, probably not in your town, said something racist on the internet." be an actual issue?

Because the former requires a coordinated sacrifice on the part of tens (or even hundreds) of millions of people and the latter requires clicking the share button on twitter. Wal Mart can be reliably trusted to address your grievances if and only if your grievances are cheap to address, so it is a bajillionty times easier to convince them to fire and replace a cashier than it is to convince them to not use slave labor, and that means one is a feasible goal for an uncoordinated mob and the other is basically never going to happen without a legislative effort.

Except that if tens or hundreds of millions of people aren't willing to make sacrifices, then if Walmart just doesn't fire the person, then they will still refuse to make sacrifices, and still shop at Walmart, almost like the thing I said, not firing the person, produces the same results as firing them, so just don't do that.

No, I mean because replacing a cashier is so cheap, the number of people willing to make sacrifices (even if they don't manage to stick to them for more than a month, because gosh darnit Wal Mart is just so cheap and convenient) before it becomes smarter to just replace the cashier is much much smaller than tens (or hundreds) of millions of people. It's an amount of total economic damage that is easily achievable through the power of viral facebook outrage, so Wal Mart will just cut you off and pay the small bill upfront.

But paying employees reasonable wages is fucking expensive (not paying employees a reasonable wage is basically their entire fucking business model), so the amount of economic damage you'd have to cause is not a thing you are ever going to accomplish without your own pet senators.

What a nerd can't all find in his room if he tidies it up a bit . . 20Gigs of assorted RAM . .

Kaelik wrote:I don't think I can really advocate for people starving to death in gutters over having said dumb misogynistic shit online.

Another reason we need basic income

Shitbirds like this (sorry, been rewatching The Wire) wouldn't NEED the jobs they should be losing for acting so horribly.

phlapjackage wrote:

Kaelik wrote:I don't think I can really advocate for people starving to death in gutters over having said dumb misogynistic shit online.

Another reason we need basic income

Shitbirds like this (sorry, been rewatching The Wire) wouldn't NEED the jobs they should be losing for acting so horribly.

It might be a tougher sell if we call it Shitbird Income.

Kaelik wrote:I don't think I can really advocate for people starving to death in gutters over having said dumb misogynistic shit online.

When you couch the issue like that's the entirety of what's at stake, sure. But the logical consequence of not firing this guy, or before that, of not telling your employees "we don't tolerate dumb misogynistic shit at all at this company" instead of "ehhhh, we don't care about your personal opinions on women unless you actually sexually assault a woman on company property" is that people will feel free to be cheerfully misogynistic, and management will expect female employees to just deal with it rather than "make a fuss". And then what is actually, practically permissible goes beyond the thereotical line of just not firing anyone over the odd questionable comment.

The US military is a prime example on this. They profess to not like sexual assault, but they have an engrained culture of "fuck PC bullshit" and they'd rather their minority of female soldiers just had thick skins. And what happens is that the people who are actively contemptuous of women push it as far as they can, sexual assault is rife, and anyone that reports is usually discouraged from doing so by their superiors. It varies from unit to unit, of course; where the superiors actually care about that stuff and take a stand and make it clear that harassing women won't be tolerated, the culture is healthier.

When you say you don't agree with the guy but don't feel like he deserves to lose his job, what you're actually saying is that you expect all the employees who are members of whatever group he hates to just expect and endure a certain level of background hostility and microaggressions from their coworkers in the interests of keeping the peace, and maybe you'll intervene when somebody inevitably "crosses the line" and actually attacks them or whatever. You're expecting the people who are the biggest targets to just be okay with being bullied, because it's easier for everyone else that way.

I'm white, I'm assuming you are too, this shit is all just abstract to us, but to the people who are the actual targets of this stuff, it's just part of the ambient bullshit they have to deal with each day, a kind of tax on being black or a woman.

Plus, being positive is really not that hard. It doesn't require much in the way of financial outlay or effort. You make it clear from the top down that discrimination isn't going to fly, you put it in the employment manuals and you train people to that effect, and then the people at the bottom just adopt whatever the ambient attitude is. Maybe the people that really would have enjoyed a safe and supportive environment from which they could abuse blacks or gays will grumble about "PC gone mad", but they'll basically do what everyone else is doing and what's expected of them.

Maybe it sucks for the one guy that got fired, but life is a bit less shitty for everyone else he would have interacted with. Including the people who aren't targets and are uncomfortable with his opinions, but would have laughed nervously when he makes rape jokes, because they're pretty sure their supervisor wouldn't find it unusual or unacceptable and wouldn't do anything about it if they told him.

SlyJohnny wrote:

Kaelik wrote:I don't think I can really advocate for people starving to death in gutters over having said dumb misogynistic shit online.

When you couch the issue like that's the entirety of what's at stake, sure. But the logical consequence of not firing this guy, or before that, of not telling your employees "we don't tolerate dumb misogynistic shit at all at this company" instead of "ehhhh, we don't care about your personal opinions on women unless you actually sexually assault a woman on company property" is that people will feel free to be cheerfully misogynistic, and management will expect female employees to just deal with it rather than "make a fuss". And then what is actually, practically permissible goes beyond the thereotical line of just not firing anyone over the odd questionable comment.

STOP BEING SUCH AN IDIOTIC FUCKING LIAR

SlyJohnny wrote:I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer. I'm a murderer.

Interesting, man that sure is interesting. I sure hope you don't think it's wrong to lie like a fucking asshole about what other people say because it's literally all you have done.

I'm not accusing you of saying anything? I'm saying that not firing people like this and therefore not taking a firmly defined and public stance against this sort of thing, inevitably leads to an organisation where the attitudes that permit this are permissible, accepted, and profligate throughout the organisation.

Like if it genuinely seemed like I was deliberately misconstruing what you said just so I could rant at you, I'm sorry and I didn't mean to come off that way. On the other hand, if you're just frothing at the mouth because you're a moron who can't understand cause and effect and therefore can't follow my argument, then I'm afraid I don't have anything for you.

The key point is that he didn't do this at work, while talking to his coworkers, or in his official capacity, so your entire argument is completely inapplicable to this entire situation.

SlyJohnny wrote:I murdered 66 people today.

You shouldn't murder people.

SlyJohnny wrote:I'm not accusing you of saying anything?

SlyJohnny wrote:When you say you don't agree with the guy but don't feel like he deserves to lose his job, what you're actually saying is that you expect all the employees who are members of whatever group he hates to just expect and endure a certain level of background hostility and microaggressions from their coworkers in the interests of keeping the peace, and maybe you'll intervene when somebody inevitably "crosses the line" and actually attacks them or whatever. You're expecting the people who are the biggest targets to just be okay with being bullied, because it's easier for everyone else that way.

Yeah, you are and you are pretty much straw-manning as well.

Kaelik wrote:

SlyJohnny wrote:I murdered 66 people today.

You shouldn't murder people.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Quit that shit. I get what you're saying, but use a different example.
[/TGFBS]

Leress wrote:

SlyJohnny wrote:I'm not accusing you of saying anything?

SlyJohnny wrote:When you say you don't agree with the guy but don't feel like he deserves to lose his job, what you're actually saying is that you expect all the employees who are members of whatever group he hates to just expect and endure a certain level of background hostility and microaggressions from their coworkers in the interests of keeping the peace, and maybe you'll intervene when somebody inevitably "crosses the line" and actually attacks them or whatever. You're expecting the people who are the biggest targets to just be okay with being bullied, because it's easier for everyone else that way.

Yeah, you are and you are pretty much straw-manning as well.

This sort of claim gets trotted out a fair amount when unpicking actual misogyny and actual racism. The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed. At best, I can see people getting used to using that construction when what they mean is "when you say X, a lot of affected people hear Y".

Omegonthesane wrote:
This sort of claim gets trotted out a fair amount when unpicking actual misogyny and actual racism. The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed. At best, I can see people getting used to using that construction when what they mean is "when you say X, a lot of affected people hear Y".

This thing is in this instance with what has been said in this thread Sly was pretty much straw-manning because Sly's objection, as Name_here pointed out, is not applicable to what Kaliek said.

SlyJohnny wrote:

Kaelik wrote:I don't think I can really advocate for people starving to death in gutters over having said dumb misogynistic shit online.

When you couch the issue like that's the entirety of what's at stake, sure. But the logical consequence of not firing this guy, or before that, of not telling your employees "we don't tolerate dumb misogynistic shit at all at this company" instead of "ehhhh, we don't care about your personal opinions on women unless you actually sexually assault a woman on company property" is that people will feel free to be cheerfully misogynistic, and management will expect female employees to just deal with it rather than "make a fuss". And then what is actually, practically permissible goes beyond the thereotical line of just not firing anyone over the odd questionable comment.

I've got to disagree. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory applies. How people act online does not in any way reflect the manner in which they'll act in real life. The internet is a separate universe that plays by it's own rules and logic, much of which is often insane.

SlyJohnny wrote:I'm not accusing you of saying anything? I'm saying that not firing people like this and therefore not taking a firmly defined and public stance against this sort of thing, inevitably leads to an organisation where the attitudes that permit this are permissible, accepted, and profligate throughout the organisation.

Like if it genuinely seemed like I was deliberately misconstruing what you said just so I could rant at you, I'm sorry and I didn't mean to come off that way. On the other hand, if you're just frothing at the mouth because you're a moron who can't understand cause and effect and therefore can't follow my argument, then I'm afraid I don't have anything for you.

Anyway, the point is to create an iron curtain between work and home. What you do on your own time is your own business and your employer must be deaf and blind to it, or pretend to be.

Because it swings both ways. Firing someone for having gay sex in their own kitchen is unacceptable. Firing someone for having gay sex in the office, on the other hand, is perfectly alright.

And having a management culture where is is acceptable to snoop into employees private lives is substantially worse than any employee culture could possibly be, and that includes the Morlock culture.

How people act online does not in any way reflect the manner in which they'll act in real life.

That isn't true, in my experience. Even the man himself obviously has become a better person on the internet since he spawned.