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by almaIV 4023 days ago
I made this word up a long time ago, but the "nice tech career you have there" move can be called 'bluelisting' -- i.e. censorship of someone's outside-employment speech via threatening someone's at-employment livelihood. I think it's a problem, and an increasingly huge one.

People who are virulently anti-libertarian inexplicably adopt very libertarian "employers should be able to hire/fire anyone they want" responses when this practice is criticized, as if they don't see any kind of problem with the ability to readily get someone fired for arguing controversial beliefs outside of their workplace.

But, think about it this way: you obviously can't deeply engage the views of others at work, unless you have a very open-minded workplace or those views somehow relate to your job performance. (I doubt questions like "is it immoral to do [insert drug]?" or "should prostitution be legal?" would ever be workplace appropriate, but they're sincere views people hold that dictate drug policy via public opinion for example.)

So, if you can't talk about these things at work, where the hell do you talk about them? I'm guessing on the internet, because colleges are the next option and they're only available to a fraction of the population for four years at a time. So the internet is no longer an option, where? I'm asking this question rhetorically. If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.

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If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.

Many of us US gun owners say "Soap box, ballot box, bullet box", but of course long term denial of the first invalidates the second. We're watching all this in horror because we really don't want to be forced to the third.

Especially since one way or another, such former democracies fail hard when faced with inconvenient truths the ruling class has been denying and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!" Doesn't have to be political, could be e.g. transmissible bird flu coupled with our current SJW public health authorities, as the Texas Ebola cases demonstrated.