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by w1ntermute 2019 days ago
It’s just another example of the “participation culture” that modern parenting and social media have made commonplace. Who needs to do anything real when you can just upvote or retweet? You get the same sort of participation trophy that you’ve been taught to aim for since childhood.
3 comments

This is such a bad-faith, shallow take. Ascribing the act of bringing awareness to “participation trophies” is nonsense.

I also disagree with the parent. Bringing change is almost always easiest from within. “Don’t like it? Leave.” stances aim to do more to attack the person involved than it does to take a critical look at whatever problem it is that’s being discussed.

It is not "don't like it? leave.", it is "stop working for immoral organizations". Would you consider a guard of a concentration camp ethical if they "condemned" the actions of the government but continued to support them via their work? I wouldn't.
The fact that they're working at Google in the first place shows they're not that ethical to begin with.

But nearly everyone has limits, and the petition signing limit was reached for these 1200 Google employees.

We'll see if the quitting limit is ever reached for any of them.

You don't need to leave, you can strike for example. "Condemning" does nothing.
It's a moral problem. If the organization you work for is immoral, by knowingly continuing to work for them you are materially cooperating in the evil they are doing and are morally culpable yourself. Sure, you can refuse to materially cooperate, but then they will fire you anyhow, as we see here.
What’s the opposite of “participation culture”? Not participating?

I feel like signing a letter of protest is doing something “real”. It’s communicating to leadership of the company that you have concerns about what has transpired. It’s not nothing.

Parent post is probably referring to the relatively new phenomena of issuing "participation prizes" instead of prizes for winning, this insulating the participants who "lost" from the stigma associated with being a "loser".
Ayn Rand's following, probably.
Is there an equivalent to Godwin's Law for Ayn Rand?
>"that modern parenting"

Back in my days we would chop off heads and assisinate politicans! These kids can't do anything right!

> Back in my days we would chop off heads and assisinate politicans!

back in my days, we would unionize and block the factories until the company died or we got what we wanted

The peak of this behavior led to a small war between coal miners and a sheriff and a small airforce that bombed the strikers that only ended when Warren Harding threatened to send in the military.

They ultimately lost but what happened there led to the sympathetic growth of the AFL and CIO and ultimately to the New Deal and the rise of the middle class.

They say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. I wouldn't be surprised if the next series of pitched struggles between American owners and labor result in extreme violence also, before giving way to a system that is slightly more egalitarian.

> Back in my days we would chop off heads

Ironic that guillotine memes are so popular among the kids these days, no?

The 70s are back in fashion.