This successful campaign by @khoaphan to swiftly get someone fired for being an asshole in a grocery store is a good example of concerns that some of us — across the political spectrum — have about mob justice and so-called cancel culture.
I think targeting jobs is a bad idea.
I think targeting jobs is a bad idea.
There is no doubt that this guy was unhinged and behaved in a socially unacceptable manner. By all means, criticize the person, shame them on social media. But targeting someone's job when we live in an anarcho-capitalist dystopia with no social safety net is wild. /2
Our society has extremely weak protections for the unemployed, and most people get health insurance for themselves, and often their family, through their employer. Moreover, if this is how you lose your job you may end up radioactive on the job market for months or years. /3
I don't understand how people can just watch a few second video clip and without knowing anything else about this scenario — what preceded it, what came after it, the actual people involved — decide to sentence that person and family to potentially extreme material hardship. /4
When pressuring a employer, the crowd is not prompting the employer to evaluate the ethical substance of the conduct of their employee outside of work. That's not the business companies are in. They're pressuring employers to make reputational cost decisions. /5
I don't understand this position. The left is currently in the midst of a massive critique of the immorality and social perils of a sadistically punitive society re: police. Punishment should be administered carefully & allow for rehabilitation./6
As @zakcheneyrice and I were discussing offline, this debate might look a lot different if workers had extremely robust labor protections and we had high union density. And he rightly points out that we should distinguish clearly between shaming and job targeting. /7
When it becomes a mass lobbying campaign w/media attention that introduces different variables into employer calculation. E.G. - we don't have the counterfactual of how his boss might have dealt with it if he happened to be an onlooker in the store. /8
Hm this might be a clue to figuring out this puzzle. Income and housing as a "privilege" seems to me to be a firmly neoliberal position being smuggled into this strand of punitive progressive politics. /9
