[gojomo]

Your attack is high on prejudicial conclusion-jumping disgust-invoking labels – 'stupid', 'amoral', 'stink', 'pile of shit' – and low on reasoning. It's also unnecessarily personal – implying a person holding a reasoned opinion is an untouchable outcast.

That's what makes it out-of-bounds.

Looking back, you made no substantive comments on thread. You just opened by making a speaker the subject, and slurring that speaker. That's nasty.

[alexqgb]

Try looking back a bit further. You'll note that it was actually the previous poster who had made the speaker the subject, and that was in the context of a remark about how he was being reflexively down-voted for (presumably) making conspicuously bad arguments.

Bear in mind that it was failures of reasoning like these - that is to say, ones grounded in distinctly personal shortcomings - that produced the situation at Pixar which we're discussing. Indeed, for those of us whose careers have taught us the importance of making suitably judicious assessments of the personal character of those we depend on, a discussion of the rhetorical hallmarks of people who defend illegal and abusive employment practices is vitally important. Spotting them quickly can be the difference between a really bad choice and a good one. So again, that's why I was saying there's value in cookiecaper's otherwise objectionable remarks: they're a case study in the kind of stuff you really do need to watch out for.

And within the specific social context I noted - i.e. people working in HR - remarks like cookiecaper's jolly well should him an untouchable outcast. For the same reason you don't want a person with a lax attitude about embezzling anywhere near your finance department, you don't want a person who thinks that contracts are "inconvenient" in a position where they're likely to conclude that violating the law "is just a lot faster and easier" than respecting it. (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of the "reasoning" on display.)

Now perhaps you don't consider a frank characterization of the sub-par ethical traits that are the direct cause of problems like Pixar's to be "substantive". On that point I can only say that we sharply disagree.

[gojomo]

You made the speaker the target of denigration. The previous poster was appealing for tolerance; you added name-calling and personalized shunning. You skipped any acknowledgement or engagement with cookiecutter's points, jumping straight to negative labels without supporting argument.

I suppose your armchair snap-judgment blackballing would also extend to people like Catmull, Jobs, Schmidt and others themselves. All of them, a pox on the industry who should have never held leadership roles. Sure, right.

[sitkack]

fancy words but a thin skin.