[ABCLAW]

Okay, not the poster above, but lets get you a more concrete example:

You are the CEO of Bread Inc. You make bread. You sell bread. As the CEO of Bread Inc., you make statements in the public about bread being terrible, that no one should eat it, and how you're only selling it because you like taking money from carb-loving hyper-idiots.

Would you consider removal from your post as justified in that situation?

[menacingly]

This model, like nearly all of them, loses many details of reality in order to be satisfying.

Of course that CEO is working counter to his organization's goals. That's the perfect cleanliness of having organizational goals that are not subject to the religion, decade, loneliness, or stomach contents of the person currently interpreting them.

If your "mission" is nearly unusable as a mission, in that probably even the people in your organization can't uniformly agree on its application, the model breaks down. That's what you signed up for with fundamentally subjective pursuits.

So, if the CEO of Freedom, Inc said she hates freedom, that's bad optics and fire-able. If she applies her understanding of freedom in a way I don't agree with, that's a tough shit moment for me. And these are the situations we debate.

[ABCLAW]

Sure. That's why it's a model. It is used to isolate an element of the factual situation for analysis.

In this case, you concede the point that if what a CEO does causes bad optics, that is potentially fireable. To loop this back to the parent comment, this means sustaining an objection to Eich's firing, you would need to conclude that what Eich did was bad optics.

I hope you recognize that this position is contradictory with your previous statement: "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period."

[leereeves]

A CEO saying "people shouldn't buy our product" ("no one should eat it") isn't just a belief, or just bad optics. That's a CEO doing the exact opposite of their job (selling the product).

[ABCLAW]

1) I don't agree that a CEO's job is "selling the product". That's literally the job of the sales team. But that doesn't really matter.

2) It is obviously the apex of bad optics. My initial point is to demonstrate that the position that "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period" isn't founded in reality. Obviously you should. No one will defend the CEO of Bread Co.

Since we've established at the apex of bad optics that removal is permitted, the rest of the discussion isn't about whether or not removal is an option, it is a discussion of where along the spectrum of bad optics should it be permissible to remove an executive.

This makes the honest question to be explored "When should you police beliefs". At that stage of discussion, the context that we're complaining about removing matters. It doesn't at the level I'm criticizing.

[leereeves]

Telling people not to buy your product is clearly an action, if anything a CEO does can be called an action.

[ABCLAW]

The action/belief dichotomy is illusory. You're never going to police something inside someone's head, so the reaction will be in respect of an action and what it signals.

[menacingly]

It also feels like it crosses the nebulous line between belief and action

[menacingly]

More specifically, I said that in a situation constructed to make the somewhat orthogonal point you're making, it works, and falls apart nearly everywhere else.

[ABCLAW]

You do realize that my argument directly mirrors a real-life occurance... right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

My point in making the example isn't to establish a framework for evaluating the Eich situation, but to indicate that it can be evaluated in the first place by showing an example in which a clear judgement can be made. This is contrary to your original emphatic position that "you just shouldn't police beliefs, period"

Defending Eich requires you not believe with enough conviction that his actions harmed the organization sufficiently to warrant removal. That's fine. You can fiddle with the conviction and harm knobs according to your beliefs. It does not, however, preclude anyone else from doing the same and coming to a different conclusion, which your policing argument would do, oddly enough.

If you want to go a different route and instead justify non-firing on completely separate grounds - that censuring political positions is, if consistent and widespread, noxious to society, or perhaps that the ambiguity in applying these standards is too high and might cause a chilling effect, etc - that raises different issues, but not those I was discussing.

[Toboe]

>If she applies her understanding of freedom in a way I don't agree with, that's a tough shit moment for me.

And if said application of understanding is strongly disagreeable not just for you, but with a significant part of both the customers and the workforce?

[joncrane]

That depends. Does profit increase or decrease after the statements?

Honestly it's way simpler than most people make it.