Definitely, didn't mean to ascribe it to one side or the other. I mainly see posters on HN referencing instances of "the left" getting people fired.
It has more to do with aggregate action, which has recently been made possible with platforms like Twitter, than with the particular ideological stances.
It is super obvious that far more people have been fired for championing leftist opinions and causes (living wages, workers' safety, unions) than for being republican/racist/islamophobic.
(Though I am not sure that the right wing dominates societal discourse like you say.)
Maybe it's my social bubble of working in tech and so on, but it seems like the left dominate the outrage more these days. Certainly social media and mainstream media is heavily left-leaning. It's obvious to me which side you have to be careful about saying you support at work. It's obvious which side will attract more downvotes on Reddit and even Hacker News. Perhaps that'll change now that Biden is in the White House, though I doubt it.
Yes, you're right this phenomenon isn't purely a left-wing one, and I think it is wrong when either side does it. I pointed at the left just because these days I see it most often done by the left, and in recent times, it is accomplished by going to service providers (like payment processors) and pressuring them to fire a client. For the record, I thought it was wrong for networks to drop the Dixie Chicks as they did.
I'm not sure I follow how some former friends booting you out of a Discord server relates to the media. Are you giving that as an example of people so immersed in a left-wing media culture that they can't handle differing opinions? That's certainly something I've seen more and more of on both ends of the political spectrum. I do think there are more moderates on the left than the right, but in both cases the extremes do seem to be hostile to nuance.
I know you're being sarcastic, but I DID mean to include those.
The right is just as guilty of this outrage game as the left; in some areas the coalitions are such that they gain power from it. In more left-leaning situations, the outrage power swings left.
I detest both. I want people to be able to say things without constantly being threatened with firings, no-platformings, and blacklists.
Well, you said many on the left leap to outrage, so I assumed you meant that universally, rather than as a subset of left wing people, which you assume are accurately represented by what gets amplified online.
It's hard to measure, but it does often bring attention to them when we have these discussions. I do feel the left's online attitude is firing back more than it's helping them. More than anything it makes people who had no position to take a side, which benefits those that are banking on the controversies the most.
I think the left tends to deal in half truths or highly questionable interpretations of facts passed off as facts, while the right deals more in outright lies.
But the left has the ability to get you fired if you question their assertions too much. So their falsehoods are actually more effective
This just doesn’t line up with my experience whatsoever. For my friends on the left it’s a common topic, and I see it discussed in left leaning publications all the time.
I wonder when I see these characterizations of the left if they are coming from social media. I’m not on any social media aside from this site I guess, so I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on. The folks on the left that I interact with in real life are definitely a very big tent group.
Google and all the rest have many people all over the spectrum, claiming they were being fired for being too left, too right, gay, straight, white, a minority etc - and whenever it happens that little side of the identity-internet jumps up and down in indignation.
I rarely see the "couldn't do the job I was asked to do" or "wound up my co-workers to the point of disruption" - or really any story where there's acceptance of any personal blame.
You do not know what a fascist is - I'd recommend you lookup "Khmer Rouge" for any future arguments you might wish to make against 'leftists'
The flipside of this is the reactionary multitudes who spout 'sjw' or 'virtue signalling' or 'socialist' when someone on the left questions the status-quo.
I mean, for a good chunk of the last decade, there was plenty of stuff that was pretty squarely in the Overton Window which was being suppressed because it wasn't sufficiently left-wing.
* A progressive data analyst at Civis Analytics Tweeted research on the efficacy of non-violent protests, and left-wing activists pressured his employer into firing him.
* A progressive journalist with The Intercept published an interview with a black man who felt that police brutality was a problem, but would have liked to see more attention for other problems in his community--similarly, activists (including coworkers) pressured his employer to terminate him until he eventually resigned.
* A university professor used a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like a slur in English, and the university was pressured into suspending him.
* A utility worker accidentally made the "OK" gesture, and activists pressured his employer into firing him.
* A boy wore a MAGA hat and the entirety of the mainstream media along with several celebrities sent a frothing mob after him, his parents, and his school falsely claiming (despite hours of publicly available video evidence) that he was participating in a racist tirade against a Native American elder and Vietnam veteran.
* A Google employee responded to a request on an internal message board with criticism of Google's hiring policies (specifically addressing how the company could foster more diversity), and left-wing activist employees pressured Google into firing him, and virtually the whole of the mainstream media falsely claimed he published an "anti-diversity screed" as a memo to the company.
No doubt Parler has become a right-wing hub, but for a good while anything that wasn't toeing the most extreme left-wing party line was considered to be "far-right extremism". There was some pretty legitimate demand for a free-speech platform, and I'm strongly of the opinion that if we were more tolerant to discussing some of these topics out in the open (which is in part to say, if our institutions were more aspirationally neutralist and objectivist), then fewer people would have found answers from far-right folks, and we would have less far-right extremism than we do today.
It has more to do with aggregate action, which has recently been made possible with platforms like Twitter, than with the particular ideological stances.
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