I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do. I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever. All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.
In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest. So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers. Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous. I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything. You never did. You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.
Suppose we grant that we should not worry about a few uncouth individuals losing platforms on major web sites. We still might want to pay attention to what deplatforming signifies about the inclinations of the zealots of the new religion.
Those who seek to eliminate blasphemy see themselves as cleansing society of its impurities. It is a short step from cleansing society of blasphemy to cleansing society of “impure” people themselves.
Imagine that it’s 1931 and Tyrone is telling the Jews of Germany that he worries much less than many of them do. He reminds them that they still have way, way more than they did in the recent past.
I don’t disagree about the intentions of the woke zealots — I think if they were given the opportunity, many of them would become 21st century Red Guards. But outside the academy and a few companies/industries that made the mistake of hiring too many of them (e.g. Google) wider society’s tolerance for their humorless woke zealotry is pretty limited. I think the current SJWs are much more like 60s radicals than 30s fascists — noisy, but lacking the broader support that would ever make them truly dangerous.
I hope you’re right about that. I wish I could be optimistic.
How is this not simply freedom of association?
Libertarians have long been advocates of freedom of association even for white racists, and thus opponents of the public accommodations provisions of the civil rights act.
So if throwing people out of restaurants for being the wrong skin color should be tolerated, why not refusing to host a blog that you disagree with? What’s the difference?
Well, imagine that Verizon refused to sell mobile phone service to those who ran afoul of Twitter-like terms of service. And refused to accept calls to or from numbers belonging to those who SJW activists disapproved of? And then imagine that AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile followed suit? Or, imagine Google imposed the same terms on the Search and Map services (no results for ‘racist’ pages or directions to ‘racist’ addresses). Would that be a problem?
Freedom of association is one thing for, say, a bakery in a market with hundreds or thousands of alternatives. It is something else in industries dominated by one (or a small handful) of market-dominant firms. And the problem is greatly reinforced by network effects in winner-take-all industries. If you are de-platformed by FaceBook or Twitter or Google Search there are simply no alternatives that can provide access those giant networks (which is why those companies are so dominant and so valuable and why losing access is such a severe blow).
You can say the same thing about lunch counters in the South. If only one a marginal fraction of restaurants discriminated against blacks, it would be no big deal. But in fact back in those days, there actually were enough businesses that discriminated that black people needed a “Green Book” to get around. But that’s exactly why the public accomodations provision was in the CRA. So if you think that Facebook/Google/Twitter need be be regulated to provide accommodations to alt-right websites, shouldn’t you also be in favor of the public accommodations provision of the CRA?
The public accommodations regulation isn’t used to help black people get lunch anymore. It’s used to chase down the one Christian baker that won’t bake the cake even when they provide a list of a dozen nearby shops that will.
Or used to prove that someone is racist because their otherwise race neutral policies cause some kind of disparate impact.
In other words, it’s used mainly by the powerful to punish the powerless (the opposite of its intent), or for race hustlers to extort people who are doing them no wrong based on a twisted use of statistics.
In fact that was basically what the opponents said at the time. That while helping blacks get lunch did seem like a good idea, once you establish the principle, people would abuse it.
While a law preventing de-platforming would be nice, the real problem is that social norms have decided that the truth is taboo. If you can legally post something on Facebook, but you lose your job for doing so, it doesn’t help much. You can argue that it’s always the case that we have these social norms, but there is a difference between being punished for posting pornography and being punished for posting the truth.
We get it. Youre a victim.
First of all, what should be tolerated and what should be legal aren’t the same. It may be hard to grasp, but one can oppose deplatforming without wanting it to be illegal.
Also, one can think calling someone a racial slur is wrong without supporting society all agreeing to ruin that person’s life forever, make sure that they can never find a job, and apartment, etc., and ultimately starve to death in an alley for the transgression for what is frankly a minor offense. The idea that, say, black people are so fragile that the site of someone criticizing the BLM movement on twitter will cause a panic attack and need such extreme protections is groundless.
Secondly, most prominent deplatforming isn’t against racists or bad people imo. In fact it’s often against people who are perfectly correct; supporting freedom of speech or due process get a lot of people deplatformed. So it’s not just a matter of people being petty or disproportionate. Much of this movement is people with bad ideas trying to suppress people with good ideas.
Why are you only concerned about the comfort of ethnic minorities? Why aren’t you bothered by the prospect of losing a job or being denied service because of one’s libertarian beliefs, for example? ‘Well, you can more easily lie about your beliefs, even if there’s nothing wrong with them, than about one’s race’ isn’t horribly compelling to those of us who don’t think ordinary people should have to hide their beliefs. But I guess it’s a matter of priorities. Personally, I’m more concerned about the idea of people losing their jobs for expressing reasonably beliefs (or mispronouncing someone’s name or accidentally misgendering someone) than about making sure no one ever again has to see the n word written on twitter.
Who died of starvation for typing the “N” word? Is there a list somewhere I can check out?
Also one might add that this perspective in which everyone else is a “religious zealot” and then comparing oneself to the Jews in 1931 Germany sounds a little … unhinged. You sound like you need to take a longer vacation from Twitter/Facebook/etc. There is not a giant SJW conspiracy to persecute libertarian economists and burn them in ovens. There is a movement, an evolution in social norms, to make it unacceptable to express certain views about race and sex, that’s all. Nobody’s trying to persecute people for saying the minimum wage is a bad idea. There’s no campus activists protesting talks about Coase theorem, or insisting that Marxism be added to the economics curriculum. It’s 100% culture war.
Tell that to Greg Mankiw:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/michael-warren/harvard-undergrads-protest-economics-class
Alert me when Greg Mankiw is deplatformed.
It seems like a pretty obvious deplatforming attempt. And argues that Arnolds’s concerns are not a “little unhinged”.
So, we should wait until it’s too late and they have already succeeded to start caring about their efforts.
5 to 10% of an undergraduate class walked out and were booed. You really are the snowflakes in these scenarios, arent you?
“There is a movement, an evolution in social norms, to make it unacceptable to express certain views about race and sex, that’s all. ”
We don’t want to burn the heretics, we just want to make it impossible for them to express their views using any common communication platform. Oh, and publicly mob and shame them and get them fired and make them radioactive for any potential future employer if they step out of line. Pour encourager les autres. That’s all.
But it should be totally cool to publicly harass and shame people for their sexual orientation, and to make it radioactive for businesses to hire and serve black people and gays. That’s just free speech, right?
What’s the difference?
I mean, it wasn’t so long ago that blacks, gays, and others were severely socially ostracized – to the point they could not get jobs. It remains legal in many states to fire people for their sexual orientation. But we’re supposed to be worried about social pressure getting the racists and the anti-gay people fired, instead? We’re supposed to be worried about the employment prospect of white guys who want to say that black people are genetically stupid, and not about the employment prospects of black people who want to just … be black.
I’m not worried about protecting the employment prospects of racists. If they get online and say stupid racist things and future employers find these things and won’t hire them — that’s their problem (though, that said, I’m really not cool with signal-boosting)
But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about mobbing, shaming (and dis-employing) people not just for obviously racist comments but for things up to and including…agreeing to represent the wrong client. NB: what was harmed in this case were the employment prospects of…a black guy who ran afoul of the woke zealots.
I do agree that these things often go too far. However, Harvard is a private institution and they are free to employ whoever they want. Its not campus activists who are the problem, they are just expressing their opinions. The problem is Harvard’s administrators too easily caving into the demands of students instead of just letting people have their say. Just because people are expressing their opinions, doesn’t mean you have to do what they want.
Why shouldn’t we be against both of those???
We should be. But the mechanism by which we prevent one is sometimes the latter. Sometimes, in order to prevent people from being harassed for their sexual orientation, you have to shame the people who are doing the harassing. I do think that many people go way overboard on this, but this is society fundamentally searching for the threshold of what level of social suppression of racist or sexist attitudes is needed in order to create a social space where black people, or women, or gays, don’t get pushed out of that social space due to the inclusion of people that don’t want to include them. Like, for instance, if you have a group of guys at work that keep giving the cold shoulder to the lone woman and freezing her out of work discussions, that’s a management issue and the mangers may want to do something about that. Personality conflicts and attitudes about race and sex are legitimate issues for management if they are affecting the work environment.
The cases that I, at least, am worried about have nothing to do with reaction against harassment. Maybe you didn’t read Damore’s “screed”, but I did. There was nothing harassing about it. It was a well reasoned, well argued discussion. There was nothing hateful about it, in fact he was trying to be helpful. And Professor Sullivan at Harvard wasn’t harassing anyone. The reaction against him isn’t establishing a new standard about racial or sexual harassment, it’s establishing a new standard about our legal system, wherein a person accused of certain crimes can’t get legal representation (or at least, can’t get good legal representation). And the professor at Yale a few years ago wasn’t harassing anyone by suggesting that the university administration didn’t need to regulate Halloween costumes. I could go on at length. You are trying to change the subject by saying it has anything to do with a reaction against harassment.
I do think that people went too far with the James Damore case, and in the other cases you cite.
The thing is I don’t see this as fundamentally a bad cause. I do think it is a good idea to try to renegotiate social norms to be more inclusive towards people of color, not to mention women or gays. Thus, I do not see this as a witch hunt or a bunch of religious zealots persecuting innocent people with “impure” thoughts. I see people basically engaged in a positive social effort getting overly enthusiastic and crossing the line and harming some innocents unjustly.
I don’t see how this can be a fundamentally good movement. Was McCarthyism a fundamentally good movement? Was it really about protecting people from the horrors of communism?
I think it’s just social bloodsport. People need an enemy to hate and punish, real or imagined. And when it comes to ‘social justice’ types, I think more imagined than real. More innocent people are punished than guilty. It’s not a good movement that sometimes goes overboard. What you call going overboard is the rule, not the exception, and the boundaries of what it sees as socially acceptable get narrower each year. You have to be dishonest or oblivious to still insist that the primary targets of these efforts are actual white supremacists, rather than merely garden variety non-leftists with ordinary non-leftist views, like that racial or gender disparities aren’t mainly caused by racism or sexism; that affirmative action is unfair; that men and women tend to behave differently largely for natural reasons, etc. Unless one regards these views as in the same ballpark as white supremacy – and maybe you do – then it’s hard to see a real kernel of value in that movement.
It seems like all “fundamentally good causes” generate some awfulness, some “going too far”. So to be a good person, you have to be both for the cause and against the awfulness.
You have to be anti-communist AND oppose Joseph McCarthy. You have to be in favor of treating all races and sexualities decently but also oppose firing James Damore.
People probably aren’t capable of tradeoffs in certain contexts. There was an iSteve commentator that summed it up well.
—
After more than a half century of political observation, I think that human beings just aren’t capable of sophisticated thought. They can hold on to one idea, and carry it to its logical conclusion, then overthrow it with another idea, and repeat the process. They can’t seem to debate limits or tradeoffs.
This is intricately related to Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and it is intimately related to Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions (essentially, a prevailing philosophy dominates science-even to the point of science actually attempting to defend it rather than refute it-the antithesis of science-until its inherent contradictions make it impossible to defend, when a ‘scientific revolution’ takes place and a new idea takes root).
The one idea that the West has been holding onto for my entire life (and basically since perhaps 1965) is EQUALITY. Those of us on the Right somehow think there has been an ongoing battle between EQUALITY and MERIT, but it really hasn’t been happening. EQUALITY dominates, and wins, in spite of its obvious inaccuracies (and just as in a scientific dominant idea, those inaccuracies are not reasons to question the doctrine: they are reasons to question opponents of the doctrine). It will continue to dominate until its inherent contradictions are too much for the theory to bear, and a new dominant theory (a ‘political revolution’) will replace it with something else (who knows that that is).
This is why the structure of discussion of race in the country over the last 50 years has been what it is.
Old Theory: races are inherently differently abled
New Theory: races are equal
Problem: Give blacks access, and they don’t do much with it
Solution (not ‘maybe races aren’t equal after all…’): give blacks more stuff to help them (affirmative action).
Problem: They still don’t seem to be doing much with it
Solution (not ‘hmm, time to rethink our thesis..’): give blacks more stuff to help them (reparations, different standards of achievement, etc etc).
Problem: we shall see.
This is tied to the ‘scramble for America,’ because if all races and peoples are equal: there is no logical endpoint for immigration (I think we all sense this). America will not wake up at 50% white (or 40% or 30% or …) and suddenly say: ‘THIS multiculturalism is just right.’ There is no plausible argument for it (just as, under the prevailing theory of EQUALITY, 90% white-before mass immigration even started-wasn’t a logical endpoint for immigration).
This is true of every political argument in our society (homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality. Transvestitism is morally equal to homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality. XXX is equal to transvestitism… and so on).
So until EQUALITY is overthrown as the prevailing philosophy of modern politics, there is really no answer or argument against it. Immigration will continue, and reparations will continue, until one of two things happen:
1) EQUALITY is no longer the prevailing philosophy of the West (and USA in particular), or
2) The USA is no longer attractive to immigration-when the USA economically no different from places immigrants come from, immigrants won’t want to come here.
When someone gets fired simply for telling the truth, as James Damore was, that seems like a problem to me.
When people get fired just for being black or gay, isn’t that a problem?
I never said otherwise. Why shouldn’t we be against both?!
Because there’s a conflict between including people that don’t want to include group X, and including group X.
If you want to have a party where your black friends feel welcome, you don’t invite the opinioned alt-right guy who is going to get drunk and start loudly expounding on the relative intelligence of various racial groups.
“If you want to have a party where your black friends feel welcome, you don’t invite the opinioned alt-right guy who is going to get drunk and start loudly expounding on the relative intelligence of various racial groups.”
I disagree with that.
If I keep my black friends from my alt-right friend how is my alt-right friend ever gonna find common ground with blacks and learn to view them as individuals instead of what he believes is a group of relatively stupid people just because of their race.
Do you think because the alt-right guy is ostracized he’s gonna suddenly stop being racist? I don’t. I think he’s gonna become more extreme and more hateful in his isolation and will find like minded people with which to live his hate filled life.
I don’t think we need more ostracism. I think we need more coming together and finding common ground.
I personally invite all friends to most things.
How does that relate to any of the examples I brought up?
@Bret, I’m more interesting in whether my black friends have a good time socializing with my non-racist white friends, than in weather opinionated alt-right guy has a learning experience.
I’m pretty alt-right I guess. I go to parties all the time where a large chunk of the party goers are some kind of minority. I don’t think anyone ever discussed race or politics or any such issue at any of these parties.
To the extent someone would, I find leftist are a lot more likely to make things political, or bring up politics in a non-political contexts. Isn’t “the right”, or the IDW, or basically anyone not progressive more or less in a giant “leave me alone” political tent in opposition to progressives.
What Weinstein calls “the upgrade” is basically all about getting in peoples face and not leaving alone the things we used to just leave alone.
I think your note about caring more about blacks then whites well being basically sums it up. Life is who…whom. You’ve got a side.
Kling wrote: ‘It is a short step from cleansing society of blasphemy to cleansing society of “impure” people themselves.’
I agree with Hazel above that thinking it’s a small step from some speech restriction to genocide sounds unhinged, at least to me.
I still believe that when political actors do not act, we often see other actors, for instance tech, step into the decision making. I am sure it is something worth monitoring but it still seems mostly limited in scope. (So it is sort of a right wing version of left focus on voting rights.)
1) I tend to side with Tyler Cowen this one because the internet has allowed the vast increase in opinions on the web.
2) They can utilize other platforms and not hard to find.
3) The list of people taken off are more eye-rolling than dangerous. Also I think barring someone like Louis Farrakkan probably makes him more popular and famous as hardly anybody under 35 has a clue who he is. Honestly, I wish they hadn’t because it creates an odd the Streisand effect for these people.
4) As these companies are more global they are going to have more significant issues here. And I bet foreign nations are more of a problem here. Venezuela is nearing a nasty Civil War and coup who is the reasonable opinion. It is rather interesting to read #Venezuela twitter feed to understand numerous exaggerated viewpoints.
Admitting that the German comparison is overblown, I still find the deplatforming trend very worrying, for the following reasons:
1) Unlimited freedom of speech was a rallying cry for the 60/70’s campus left/civil libertarians, and the 90/00’s tech/futuristic libertarians. The current deplatforming trend is a formal admission by the national elite that unlimited freedom of speech is no longer an official value of ours, and (perhaps) never was such a value save for its utility in undermining previous (more conservative) mores. That’s a rather startling admission.
2) Part of the previous ‘free speech’ ethos was the belief that private censorship, even if not formally blocked by the First Amendment, was nonetheless repugnant to our national principles. For example, the hagiography surrounding the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, who (for the most part) suffered no legal penalty and were only prevented from working in an industry which had a unique ability to shape the national consciousness. The screenwriters, in today’s parlance, were merely ‘deplatformed,’ and yet this deplatforming has long been considered as both cruel and unjust. The current relaxed approach to private deplatforming is therefore a considerable change.
3) There is no reason to believe that the current deplatforming trend will do anything other than accelerate, both in punishments administered and scope of those punished. For example, Keith Ellison (Congressman and former #2 in the DNC) has publicly urged Amazon to remove any books written by any individual or organization whom the SPLC should designate as a ‘hate group.’ And I have seen articles on progressive sites speculating rather cheerfully that if and when Cloudflare becomes a publicly traded company, pressure can brought to bear to keep it from providing DDOS protection to disfavored websites. That either of these possibilities are even being publicly discussed is somewhat ominous.
4) Having abandoned the “Schelling Point” of unlimited free speech in favor of a presumed balance between free speech and social order, the U.S. may find itself lacking any principled basis for disputing the speech regimes of countries that set the balance differently than we do. As one obvious example, as China (probably) develops the power to impose its ‘social credit’ system, de facto, in other countries, we may find it increasingly hard to explain to the Chinese (or to ourselves) why that system violates any fundamental value of ours.
freedom of speech is no longer an official value of ours
In retrospect, what we really wanted was moderately cheap speech. When speech approaches free, the volume of spam goes to infinity. If speech was moderately costly, I wouldn’t be getting ten calls a day from a guy who calls himself “Alan”, speaks with a strong Tamil accent, and wants to talk to me about the Medicare that I won’t have for 20 years (if then).
I will point out that the topic under discussion in that post was the deplatforming of Roissy, not by Google Search, YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. It was the deplatforming from WordPress, whose trademark can be found right down there in the bottom right corner of this page.
What I found amusing is that the majority of the commenters on MR were ok with the deplatforming, too, but if Cowen started eliminating their comments and blocking them, every single one of them would be outraged by it.
Down the street from me is the local news station. When reporting on the latest Baltimore mayor having to resign in scandal, the anchor mentioned something along the lines of “this is our third Baltimore mayor that was a black woman tied into the black political machine, and the third mayor to resign in scandal. Baltimore government is famously dysfunctional, and a sort of race based corrupt political establishment is a big part of that problem. Is another black woman from the same machine really the answer?” That’s not a direct quote, and she phrased it way more PC then that, but that was the jist to anyone that knows to read between the lines.
She of course got fired.
Of course if she was Sarah Jeong working for the NYTimes and said that a city having too many white men as mayor was the source of dysfunction she would probably just get a promotion and be called stunning and brave.
The way this works is that nobody who is “silenced” is going to be put in a gas chamber. It’s just going to be made clear that anyone who questions the party line will be denied the communication platforms necessary for change and have their lives basically torn down. The price is ever escalating dysfunction that can’t be questioned, even if there are no actual gulags.
DC Metro 97% black and fired all of the competent white engineers that snitch on the union? Notice it and get destroyed. No gulags. You just can’t actually get your society working. The price is one you pay every time another train get trapped underground. Or your late to work. Or your taxes go up but nothing seems to get fixed. There were lots of people who put up their Green Grocer signs and thus weren’t dragged off to the gulag, but they still had to live in a broken dysfunctional society. That’s the price of not being able to discuss problems, they don’t get fixed.
DC Metro 97% black and fired all of the competent white engineers that snitch on the union? Notice it and get destroyed.
That’s ordinary corruption, not a SJW crusade against white men.
You could just as easily write it as
“DC Metro fired all the competent engineers who snitched on the union? Notice it and get destroyed.”
Why is race even a relevant factor?
Again, nobody is being silenced for trying to organize a Green Grocer. They’re being shunned for saying things that are considered racist/sexist/etc. Those things are pretty much exclusively culture war race/gender related issues. Nobody’s going to stop you from complaining about corruption in the DC Metro. They’re going to get pissed off if you say it’s because black people are bad and stupid.
The union is 97% black and potential employees of other races are shut out.
Seems like race is maximally relevant here. These people aren’t corrupt with random people, they are corrupt in collusion on the basis of race.
Why shouldn’t we criticize the union being 97% black. It’s pretty obvious that nepotism and corruption is the only way that could come about. It seems to me very hard to find a scenario where the DC metro remains 97% black without corruption being the driver. There is no way to discuss corruption without discussing race when they are so intertwined.
If everywhere you get a lot of black people things become stupid and bad, that’s just a reality. Saying you can’t TELL THE TRUTH is ordering everyone to lie. When you order people to lie you make it impossible for them to discuss realistic narrative of the world and solve problems. For instance, the problem of breaking up a corrupt black mafia controlling the metro.
Will telling the truth piss some people off, sure. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You don’t need to capitulate to someone who says “I’m pissed off”. You could just say “we are doing this anyway whether you like it or not because you’re wrong.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/26/metro-derailed-by-culture-of-complacence-incompete/
“The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.”
…
“It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.
“The average rider wouldn’t believe the things that go on. There are so many easy things we could do to make the system better,” a station manager said. “But they’d never put me in charge because they know I’d make sure others actually did their jobs. They don’t want change. It’s go along to get along.”
…
“The odds of such a disparity occurring by chance are statistically infinitesimal,” Ronald A. Schmidt, a lawyer representing 12 white women exploring a class-action lawsuit, wrote in a 2003 letter.
“There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”
The average Metro worker had a $60,000 salary, which rises to $69,000 including overtime. That is more than 71 percent of area residents who had an income in 2010, including 62 percent of whites, census records show.”
“Also rising rapidly to senior supervisor was Robbie O. McGee, who spent eight years in federal prison for felony distribution of PCP while on probation for another crime. He received five pay increases at Metro in two years.”
….
“For example, Ms. Townsend said, by 2004, many trains were operating without radios in defiance of federal rules. Other drivers confirmed that was common knowledge. So she authored a study and included a recommendation that Metro start substituting cellphones.
“I was read the riot act: ‘You had no right to compile these statistics,’ even though it was my job. They didn’t want people showing problems,” she said.”
…
Pencil-whipping
Days after a Red Line accident killed nine in July 2009, Brenda Whorton drew the line.
“I told them I wasn’t going to pencil-whip for them,” she said, referring to a technique so common in Metro culture that there is a term for it. “It means fudging it: like marking down that a motor’s according to specs when it’s not.” It is common for midnight-shift workers to “lock the doors and go to sleep, because they’ve got other jobs,” and equally common for supervisors to turn a blind eye, she said, leading to pencil-whipping of the inspections they’re supposed to be doing — and delays for morning riders.
“Anyone who blew the whistle or caused any trouble, when pick time came — every six months you pick shifts — you’d be moved. They spend more time trying to manipulate this stuff than they do doing their job.”
Dozens said white workers, especially women, were openly subject to racist and sexist remarks without repercussion — behavior that drove many targets to seek transfers or leave the agency. All said they have been inexplicably passed over hundreds of times for promotions to positions such as station manager while others with less seniority passed them by.
“I was the only white woman in car maintenance out of 338, and they made my life miserable,” Ms. Whorton said, adding that colleagues once electrified a track circuit on which she was working and laughed. “Nothing happened to them.”
…
A flier circulated as Mrs. Jeter was running for election claimed she worried that “too many whites might end up in charge. She also told me she was sick and tired of hearing about the Latino Caucus.”
When a worker says he or she has been treated unfairly by Metro, the union membership holds a vote to decide whether to defend the worker, typically obtaining reductions in punishment from management for or voting to take to arbitration more than 40 complaints monthly.
Court records show that a white woman, Denise Brooks, was fired after her wallet was stolen from an area accessible only to employees. She reported the theft, then asked to modify the report to better reflect the contents of her wallet after checking bank records. A supervisor said the update amounted to lying and fired her, a move that ultimately was overturned.
When Mrs. Brooks brought problems about the way she was being treated to the union, records show, the membership voted twice to deny her grievances.
Court records show many of those who get into trouble at Metro for fighting, drugs and the like and have disciplinary actions reversed at the union’s behest, meanwhile, already have documented track records of similar behavior. A newsletter boasts, for example, that the union won reinstatement with back pay for a train operator if she completed a drug class. But a search of her name in criminal records indicates that far from this being an isolated incident, the woman has a well-documented drug and theft problem.
Nobody’s going to stop you from complaining about corruption in the DC Metro. They’re going to get pissed off if you say it’s because black people are bad and stupid.
I think you are wrong about that. If you complain about corruption in the DC Metro, it may be pointed out that 97% of the employees are black and so you are really complaining about black people and thus that you are actually being racist.
You say, “They’re being shunned for saying things that are considered racist/sexist/etc.” but if something like the above can be “considered” racist/sexist/etc., then legitimate discussion can be shut down and people can be unfairly accused of being morally shunable.
I take a certain amount of pride in being censored, which is rather hubristic of me.
I looked up the word hubristic, my first guess was hubric. I was all excited about being a hubric, and got that drab word instead. Hubric, sound like a cool new identity group. But I digress.
on the bright side, deplatforming may be driving traffic back to blogs