A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

Nobody thinks black lives don’t matter. This is very different from supporting BLM, however. Many prominent black public figures have come out denouncing BLM, and it isn’t because they think their own lives don’t matter.

The name is purely orwellian PR trickery that you can’t argue with, just like “antifa” is. It’s a remarkably effective tactic because most people assume it just means what the words say.

I thought this deserved to be broken out to a separate reply.

I actually used to be in that camp. In my case I used to say some extremely heteronormative patriarchal objectifying bullshit ironically (typical examples would be "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" or "get me a beer, bitch". This started pretty darn early, like 10 years old. My mom's friends all thought it was hilarious when I was asked what piece of chicken I wanted and I answered with a deadpan "well, I'm usually a leg man, but..."). In other words, I was pretending to be a misogynist asshole for purposes of humor.

It turns out that as an adult, many of the people closest to me couldn't always tell I was being ironic, despite the obvious (to me) extreme contrast between these statements and my everyday persona.

And that's entirely aside from the fact that this sort of humor is painful to people who regularly encounter the real thing when it is meant to hurt them, even if they completely understand that I don't mean it that way. I was essentially using their pain as a prop for my humor.

So, I could have responded with some variant of "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke", but that would have left me associating only with people who a) got my sense of humor and put up with it, as well as b) people who didn't but approved of the literal interpretation and were encouraged by it. That wouldn't have been a good outcome for me.

To give a less pointed example of my sense of humor, I once horrified a co-worker who brought to my attention a severe defect that would have caused a user security issue if it had been deployed to production by responding "Well, we certainly couldn't allow that!" with heavy sarcasm. I was using sarcasm ironically. Since I immediately escalated the issue I would have thought that it was obvious that I was taking the issue very seriously, but I had misjudged my audience.

It is incumbent on me to communicate clearly, even or especially when using humor. And my sort of weapons-grade irony and sarcasm can't be handled too carefully.

Now, what you're talking about isn't quite the same thing (since I actually try to not be an asshole), but in your case it really is incumbent on you to communicate clearly as well when you're being an asshole that you are not being an asshole to a black trans woman because they are a black trans woman, and also that you aren't being an asshole to them as a black trans woman. And you have to somehow do it without a bunch of "I'm not a racist etc., but..." qualifiers. The latter point is so subtle, you're never going to be able to get it right, except perhaps one-on-one with someone you know very well (eg. my spouse thinks a "get me a fuckin' beer, woman" demand from me is hilarious, but that's in part because she knows I don't like beer, and rarely swear. Even with her I would be pretty careful about asking for anything else that way). You certainly won't get it right while still using racist and transphobic rhetoric.

So, you have a stark choice similar to mine: stop being an asshole to black trans women, or end up associating only with people who think doing that is excusable, normal, or even desirable, behavior.

In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.

Different companies vary what is allowed and or encouraged and experience different benefits and consequences.

> You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.

I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.

>>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.

> The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.

I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.

> Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.

My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.

A good example recently from current events was the US president being asked in a press conference to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, "win, lose, or draw". He responded with "we'll have to see what happens". In the context of the question being posed, that's a clear and explicit failure to commit, given that context.

Context can entirely invert the meaning of two identical statements, and, in the right context, a failure to do a certain thing, or even remaining silent, can indeed be an explicit statement.

Another case comes from 2013, Salinas v Texas, when the police were questioning a murder suspect who suddenly became quiet during questioning when the topic turned to the murder. They were able to use this sudden silence as incriminating circumstantial evidence, given that specific context. This resulted in silence in the face of questioning by the government having to be explicitly invoked as such to not be potentially incriminating, which is an odd state of affairs and probably not the best outcome, but you can however tell that those judges weren't completely insane. Silence after saying "I affirmatively invoke my right to remain silent" is very different than silence after you were just answering police questions voluntarily, until they asked you about a murder they thought you committed.

Silence can speak volumes, explicitly, given the circumstances preceding and surrounding that silence.

Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, once said:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”