by Saline9515 8 hours ago
But are his opinions relevant here? Do you ask the political opinions of everyone you work with?
If someone at work was writing blog posts with white-supremacist code, then yes, I would probably go to HR and they would probably get in trouble. Maybe they wouldn't be fired, but they would be placed on another team. And then the people on that team would find the blog posts, and the same thing would happen, and they would probably be let go at some point.
Because people that do that type of thing usually cannot shut up about it.
Noam Chomsky: 'If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.'
Also, your solution doesn't solve your problem: your colleague won't stop to hold ideas that you don't like, nor his blog will disappear. If it's just a blog, he didn't harmed anybody, whereas you got him fired.
There's multiple levels of freedom of expression. You could argue, and people do, that the company has it's own right to freedom of expression, and wants to portray itself in the way it wants, and that necessarily involves deciding who they work with.
For example, if I told you that you are forced to associate yourself publicly with someone you don't like and don't want to associate with, then you might say I'm hindering your freedom of expression.
And this is missing the elephant in the room: white supremacy is fundamentally anti-free-expression. That's one of it's core tenants. So we have a little bit of tolerance paradox here.
If we allow those who oppose free expression to freely express that, then they express it by limiting free expression, then by allowing free expression we've actually suppressed free expression. So, it's tricky.
>Do you ask the political opinions of everyone you work with
they are the HR of IT ofc they do a ideological sniff test on anybody they even so much as talk to. Can't have anybody disagreeing in this tolerant space.
Everyone does an ideological sniff test of everyone they interact with. You don't want to be friends with wackjobs or racists or whatever, because the odds those people suck in other ways is very, very high.
I also hate the framing of "disagreeing" in these discussions. It's perfectly valid to distance yourself from people because you disagree, and this is something you yourself practice on a daily basis. That is just being human.