Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change?
For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash at the next election and it reduces the chances of anything actually being done. Is someone allowed to make a critique like that?
The bottom line is there actually needs to be a diversity of thought to solve problems, and if you silence anyone who isn't 100% behind your message your not going to make change.
> Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
No, and I never said as much.
My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.
I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.
> I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace.
If I was running a company, I would prefer employees not to talk about politics because it will create needless arguments that have nothing to do with the job at hand. If I am an employee, if there is a disagreement about something, how do I know there is not going to be a long-standing hatred from a colleague about my position on a topic that will manifest itself in unpredictable ways.
There are too many activists which make every topic good vs evil and life vs death.
No but the issue is a statement on the project’s page, which is a public good. Expressing support for a just and important movement for social progress like BLM is, in this respect, expected and thus asked. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s a social movement that the right is trying to vilify and turn into a political wedge issue, as well as cultural “Other”.
The more times you can bring people of different opinions and beliefs together, the more good can be done in the world.
The activists of today just divide people, and cause more net pain in the world than the moderates.
Deep down I think these kinds of divisive activists are actually just fighting their own personal deamons and need a way to vent their anger, because their real personal problems in life are unchangeable.
If Neville Chamberlain and his cronies had strangled the infant Nazi regime at its birth, rather than appeasing Hitler, many of those people would have lived.
Instead, the appeasement just meant that the war, when it inevitably came, was vastly more horrible and cost vastly more lives than it otherwise would have.
And let's not forget people like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric.
All of those are not examples of "pacifism". All those are just people who were in favor of the Nazi Germany as a model of governance and/or profiteering from it.
>If Neville Chamberlain and his cronies had strangled the infant Nazi regime at its birth, rather than appeasing Hitler, many of those people would have lived.
That wasn't pacifism. That was a mix of avoiding the cost, a miscalculated idea about the long-term plans of Germany, and being OK with having Germany thwart the reds.
Not to mention that it could have been even worse for the victims if they had gone to war immediately, as they were unprepared ("Some recent historians have taken a more favourable perspective of Chamberlain and his policies, citing government papers released under the Thirty Year Rule and arguing that going to war with Germany in 1938 would have been disastrous as the UK was not ready.").
That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so.
>2.Being good at war is a good thing.
Not for the casualties -- and often not for the general population either. Would a better at war Nazi Germany be "a good thing"? Would a better at Vietnam US be?
> That's just how it is today, not some natural law. Companies can and have been democratic (e.g. coops and other such forms), and companies can be more democratic going forward if people want it so.
Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over, i.e. not democratic > democratic in the business of surviving. Regardless of your ideals.
> Wouldn't survivorship bias dictate that the most successful companies are the ones that are left over
It might indicate that the current environment in the US, including the legal/regulatory environment and the social environment, is structured (in some cases deliberately) to favor anti-democratic corporations, yes. (Note that at least some sources I've seen indicate that European worker coops have higher survival rates than conventional firms in the same market.)
Or it just might indicate that the democratic governance of firms in the US market is a less frequenrly tried thing, which has had less experience from which to optimize.
Response: "Crazy"
Only way to survive in a tech company.