Some Facebook Employees Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture

A rather common solution that partly solves the issue of making the service universal. It could easily benefits one group more than an other, but at least it would be equally accessible for any religion to use as their space. Historically through there hasn't been many churches that successfully served multiple religions at the same time. My hat is off to those Muslims that will share pray room with nursing mothers at the same time.

> What valuable input on a subject do you believe that a member of the majority could give to members of said minority?

That the majority and minority belong to the common group called human, where everyone share more in common than not. Why do people in progressive topics (women in tech) think that people should be treated different based on gender? To quote Carl Sagan, gender stereotyping and reducing people down to a single bit, male or female, is lazy thinking.

> It's just as much a bonus to the company, who wishes to attract more LGBT folks.

They would get the same bonus if they wish to attract any other group in the world. There is an infinitive number of grouping and classification that humans being can sort them selves in, and thus a company has by this logic a infinitive amount of bonus to get. Is one group more worthy than an other?

> if you wish to create a nudist group and organize a nudist mixer, you're more than free to do so, provided you can acquire a space that will allow you to be freely nude.

Same is true for the LGBT folks. Everyone should have the same liberty to to organize events if they can acquire a space to do so.

> So the fact that it's Black History month isn't somehow deserving of this special feature?

Every month is a special month for some group. Every day is "day of X". There is not a single day on the year that don't get celebrated by one group or an other. Should we start ranking those, and if so, where does Black History month rank up compared to other special days, weeks or months? Lesser than Christmas but better than Thanks Giving? This not something that is measurable but rather completely up to the ever changing local culture to define how special it is.

The tolerance paradox comes up a lot, but I don't think it's that hard to decode, really. Nobody has universal "tolerance" -- everyone has things they consider intolerable if they have values at all. Characterizing someone as intolerant is essentially a somewhat pejorative way of saying that you've found a boundary value for them and you don't think it's drawn in the right place because it trespasses on some liberty you think you or someone else should have. How defensible that is depends partly on the strength of the case for the value and partly on whether any observing jurors share your temperament.

And I think tolerance happens on different axes. For some people, tolerance means allowing space for all kinds in society. For some it means maximal ability to live as you choose. For some it means a free expression of ideas.

Whatever you call people who value one or more of these things (conservative, liberal, progressive), if someone trammels in action or expression on any of those values, it's not terribly surprising they might face some hostility rather than conversational/social tolerance because they're challenging a value of tolerance.

When conservatives accuse left-leaners of intolerance, what I usually observe is that a conservative has forwarded some sort of idea under which space for all kinds in society or certain bands of acceptable behavior are limited, and then they're surprised that they face hostility and dismayed that they can't even say whatever they like without social consequences.

It's tempting to put conservatives as champions as speech at this point based on the fact that left-leaners see some ideas as not just points of debate/exploration but as attacks on values (which they do)... but of course there's plenty of ideas conservatives don't like to the point they'll engage with similar or greater hostility (see: kneeling during the national anthem). I think very few people are fully tolerant of any idea, and many of those who are probably have been in a fortunate position in life where ideas rarely have concrete consequences for them.

Your point about the values Facebook claims is well-taken, of course. This discussion arguably takes on a different aspect to the extent that Facebook tries to be quite liberal in its approach to speech and ideas. If that were to apply internally, if it were to take the shape of a policy where employees could openly discuss politics without fear of affecting their employment status, that'd be quite remarkable considering how incidental at best (and more likely friction-inducing) that is to the activity of most companies. Perhaps FB claims it as an ideal without a whole lot of care about how it actually plays out, perhaps it's just a PR move, or perhaps they genuinely consider it as important. But even if they do... there's simply no way to guard against diminished respect among co-workers if you're fond of Ayn Rand and they've assessed her and found her severely lacking, and little way to eliminate consequent individual hostility.

Is there any evidence that Mr. Amerige or others he holds solidarity with have faced anything else?

Sort of like Galileo did?

Sometimes the societal norms of what is considered "ignorant" are wrong.

If you haven't come across it, I would highly recommend the book Galileo's Middle Finger. It was written by a lefty who started her career as an activist fighting for the humane treatment of intersex people (a marginalized group). But later in her career she discovered lots of people who were accused of being ignorant had actually been unfairly smeared by people whose accusations didn't stand up to scrutiny.

That you're comparing positions that advocate genocide to the thoughts of Galileo just shows your complete lack of genuine desire to understand.