I wrote a couple of potentially controversial tweets yesterday and earlier today. I'm happy to say everyone responded respectfully, and at least tried to respond to the questions I asked. #
The first was about political discussions at work. The issue was raised by the recent controversy at the Basecamp company, which had suspended political discussions on the company's internal message boards. Later it came out that they were getting criticism for an internal list they kept of customers with "funny" names. I wrote about this on April 28.#
It’s a privilege to spend the day discussing politics instead of doing the job you were hired to do. At least some jobs could not work that way. Could a bus driver? An assembly line worker. A teacher. A tech support worker. A cashier at Starbucks. A cop. Emergency room doctor.#
Suppose you worked at a company handling customer service calls. It’s a grind. All those angry people you deal with. But it’s a job. One of your colleagues spends much of their time on an internal discussion board commenting on the people they work with.#
They start talking about you! You looked at someone funny in the lunchroom. You might be a white supremacist. Do you keep answering support calls, or join the discussion. You’re worried you might lose your job. Someone saw you reading a suspicious magazine.#
If you can't tell, as a former founder of two companies, I think people should keep political discussions at work to an absolute minimum. It should be possible for people with different political views to work together. This, to me, is one of the central features of freedom. You are free to believe what you believe and so am I. But we can and must still respect each other, and the highest form of respect in my opinion is to create something with each other. Personal blogs are good places to express political opinions, so is Twitter. But not work. #
The other thread was about the use of the forbidden n-word to apply to white people.#
Dave Chappelle uses the n-word to speak about individual white people. #
I like that a lot, but only if you feel affection toward the person. I don't feel that way about Chappelle. I think he's using it as an act of hostility, knowing there's no way for a white person to respond in kind. But thanks to Larry David, if you have the chutzpah to talk back, we have a good response! #
Karri Carlson asked me to listen to comments by Ta-Nahisi Coates, which I did, specifically pointing at 3:23 in the video. I understand that blacks use the n-word as a term of endearment for each other and it's not something white people are entitled to an opinion about, according to Coates. Whatever he says, we can have opinions about whatever we want, as he has negative opinions about white people, and expresses them. At 3:23 he makes a generalization which I found offensive. I don't think I own everything. Further I don't want to use the n-word, and further, please don't use that word to refer to me. Thanks. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)