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Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

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Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#361

Post by dionian »

vidarh wrote: post #219
MrMember wrote: post #173

>"The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency was distressed to discover this morning, January 25th, that one of our agents has been using the social media platforms Gab and Parler. We do not condone this activity, and we apologize to anyone who has been affected or offended by this" This honestly reads like satire. Why were they "distressed" by this and who could possibly be affected or offended by something so trivial?

These platforms are seen as far right and extremist by a lot of people. Whether or not that assessment is accurate, it will distress a lot of people who do agree with that assessment. Depending on the demographics of the authors they represent, it may well be a significant negative for their business to be associated with those platforms.

> These platforms are seen as far right and extremist by a lot of people.

How did these people get so radicalized such that speech they don't like is "extremist"?

The same kind of people were saying its fine if you get deplatformed from Twitter, but now want to ostracize you for using the alternatives.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#362

Post by sneak »

mssundaram wrote: post #193
sneak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about credentials, hiring someone is a risk and you basically go into it as an employer flying blind. I request social media links (not passwords, just profile links) from everyone I'm considering hiring, because any/all information I can use to winnow potentially problem hires out before I make an offer is extremely valuable to me. You can tell a lot about a person from their social media profiles and posts.

Do you even have social media accounts yourself? It seems very contradictory coming from someone who announced he is leaving LinkedIn and Twitter

I run a whole-ass BBS, several chat servers, and a mailing list, and have personal websites in the wayback machine going back to the 90s. I am extremely online.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#363

Post by Person5478 »

iso1631 wrote: post #198
hapless wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Frederick's employees quit -- her statements on twitter angered her staff so much they no longer wished to associate with her. That's not cancel culture. That's common sense. Don't make your coworkers so angry that they'd rather be jobless than spend time in your presence. The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences. Frederick spoke her mind in a public square, and sig…

> The freedom of speech isn't the freedom to speak without consequences People in East Germany were free to speak, they just got consequences. Freedom of speech in the US means that the government can't punish you for saying something, except in situations where they can (incitement, copyright, libel, contempt of court, etc)

Freedom of Speech in the US is a tenet and a philosophy.

What you're referring to is called a constitutional amendment, which also gets pulled under the umbrella term 'Freedom of Speech' because it's a practical implementation of the ideal.

This idea that it's defensible to actively work against the ideals of Freedom of Speech because of a constitutional amendment just doesn't fly. It would be akin to me claiming it isn't immoral to cheat on my spouse because there are laws requiring lawyers to avoid breaching the trust of their clients and therefore trust isn't anything people should consider unless they're lawyers.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#364

Post by throwaway0a5e »

jobigoud wrote: post #163
nilkn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's never been on the DC metro, my first reaction to this story was that it's pretty unreasonable to post an employee's photo to Twitter just because they ate on the train. While we can't say for sure that they wanted to get the employee fired, their intent was clearly for them to be held accountable in some way by their employer for this infraction. That said, if it's true that metro passengers have eff…

I've seen this interesting behavior in other contexts. There is a stupid rule that nobody likes. People make an effort to follow it despite hating it. When they see someone breaking the rule they feel that it's very unfair because of the effort they are making, so they report it to make it fairer. Either everyone should follow the rule or it shouldn't exist. But in doing so they have become what they hated. They are…

Narcing on your neighbor for building an unpermitted shed because you feel like a chump for pulling permits when the reality is you both could have gotten away without permits is very different from narcing on somebody who is only getting away with it because they have some special status with the organization responsible for the rule.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#365

Post by srtjstjsj »

Macha wrote: post #354
aaronharnly wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has to do with which names have been chosen for people, and which chosen by people.

Not always, for example, Native American on reservations use the term Indian to refer to themselves, but outside this is becoming impolite in favour of Native American (including among some but not all Native Americans)[1][2] See also the "Spastics Society", "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People", modern use of the n-word among black people, the use of "Negro" in "I have a Dream". Plenty of case…

"colored people" is a wonderful illustration of this farce because NAACP kept the name so long that it went from preferred to offensive and almost back to preferred, with "people of color" being the PC term in US (and "people with Foo" becoming dispreferred to "Fooed people" or "Fooed"/"Foo", and "racialized" being the PC term in Canada (which would be horrifically offensive in the US).

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#366

Post by srtjstjsj »

guntars wrote: post #124
common_crow wrote: post #10

Reminds me of Dawn Frederick, a literary agent who was "cancelled" for calling 911 on looters who rammed a van into the gas station on her apartment block: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p... This happened during the BLM protests this summer in St. Loius. The looters she reported were blocks away from any BLM protest, and other looting bands were setting fires on nearby blocks. Frederick w…

From that story, it doesn’t seem like calling 911 was the problem. It was tweeting about it.

Tweeting was the trigger. Hysteria was the problem.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#367

Post by Chazprime »

hluska wrote: post #305
common_crow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're speaking of the Scott Bergstrom debacle? Yeah, I remember that one. Link to Scott's interview that infuriated those authors is here: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child... Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.

I’m not sure that I’d call the reaction to Bergstrom a debacle. Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt that made everyone angry: “It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’…

Those quotes really don’t warrant the disproportional responses to his book nor the vitriol directed at him personally & professionally.

I think it’s time we start calling out the social media mobbing for what it really is: hateful.

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#368

Post by thaumasiotes »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #365
Macha wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always, for example, Native American on reservations use the term Indian to refer to themselves, but outside this is becoming impolite in favour of Native American (including among some but not all Native Americans)[1][2] See also the "Spastics Society", "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People", modern use of the n-word among black people, the use of "Negro" in "I have a Dream". Plenty of case…

"colored people" is a wonderful illustration of this farce because NAA CP kept the name so long that it went from preferred to offensive and almost back to preferred, with "people of color" being the PC term in US (and "people with Foo" becoming dispreferred to "Fooed people" or "Fooed"/"Foo", and "racialized" being the PC term in Canada (which would be horrifically offensive in the US).

I enjoyed the suggestion I found somewhere that the NAACP should replace the problematic term "Colored People" in its name with "African Americans".

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#369

Post by crispyambulance »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #146
neartheplain wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve gone and assumed the worst. “Trying to get that employee fired?” I just don’t see it. Anyway, the Metro employees union would never go for it. The no-eating rule is a fairly big deal on Metro. A twelve-year-old girl was famously arrested for eating a single French fry [0], in a case (Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the arres…

I’m not defending the vitriol or racist and toxic remarks she received; I’m saying she was using her position as a blue checkmark to publicly shame someone and to try to get them fired. And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences. She could have reported it privately, but she chose to use her…

> And as a self-described social media and communications expert, she should have known that using her position of power to shame/snitch on someone could carry consequences.

Exactly. She knew better and was sophisticated enough to discern what was proportionate to the situation.

To be fair, the DC metro is among the cleanest in the NE USA. It's not North Korea clean, but it's far better than NYC and Philly. The reason it's clean is because the system does a decent job of policing the trains and hires enough people to keep it clean.

I've seen people eat entire large pizzas on NY subways, I've seen people eat massive wet smelly hoagies in Philly and deliberately plop a handful of the onions on the floor of the train like it was nothing. I can at least understand her outrage, but she could have handled it differently.

Maybe she took the "if you see something, say something" directive a bit too seriously?

Re: Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab

#370

Post by srtjstjsj »

rayiner wrote: post #337
enkid wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence the "left wing" is in any more of an echo chamber than the right wing? Is this just personal observation or do you have something more to point to?

It’s not any more of an echo chamber, but in my experience it’s easier these days to hold heterodox opinions on the right. (Partly because over the last couple of decades the right has become more heterodox while the left has become more ideologically uniform.)

I guess, but we just had a huge violent assault on the center of US government from the right, attempting to main and threaten to kill members of their own right-wing power circle for not helping too illegally overturn an election.
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