Guest post: If we don’t “punch down” against bad ideas
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Fanatic rants.
According to their Facebook page, the employees in question have been sacked.
Because this act was not aligned with our values, the employees involved in the incident are no longer employed by Farley’s.
This is part of the company’s second apology. I can sort of empathize with the owners on this one. According to the Jewish News of Northern California:
The coffee shop has also shown public support for the Civic Joy Fund, a local nonprofit founded by Jewish community activists Manny Yekutiel and Daniel Lurie. Yekutiel, who was referred to as “our good friend Manny” by Farley’s on Instagram, was with his family in Israel during the Oct. 7 attack.
So imagine you’re the owners of this coffee shop. You support a Jewish charity founded by a close friend who was in Israel on 7/10. And your employees make international news, doing this.
At first you want to find out what happened, so you put out your first apology that doesn’t explicitly say anybody is getting fired, because you’re furious and don’t want to make that decision in a blind rage.
This what the media picks up, your first apology. You calm down a bit, or find that you can’t, and make the decision that, no, these snotty little assholes need kicking out the door, so you put out your second statement saying that’s what’s happened.
The media hasn’t picked that one up because they’ve moved on in their reporting – meaning that Farley’s will probably have this stain on its reputation for about as long as it continues to exist.
This is what happens when you hire the sort of people who think Hamas can be excused by pointing to the imbalance in power. The classic power imbalance is between employer and employee – and this particular type thinks having a power imbalance means never having to consider your own behavior might have consequences.
The whole ideology of “don’t punch down” and trying to redefine racism to power+prejudice has led to this moment. The way the TRA movement operates, and how its allies excuse it, has led to this moment.
If we don’t “punch down” against bad ideas, then we allow those ideas to fester, and frankly the smell from those ideas has become off-putting.
Agreed. The “punching up/punching down” distinction always was just one of a very large number of tactics that amount to: “you’re not allowed to disagree with us”.
Bad ideas should be critiqued even when they are propounded by people of “marginalized” identities and even when the critique comes from people “of privilege”.
For one thing, if “marginalized” people hold bad ideas, the people most harmed by that are themselves.
And, once again, too often who counts as ”up” (and hence a legitimate target of punching) vs. ”down” (and hence entitled to do the punching) has more to do with who shouts loudest, is capable of assembling the largest mob etc. than any objective assessment of relative disadvantage.
I don’t believe it’s easy to know whether a prospective employee is that sort of person. I know that my college student son was surprised by how many people he considered friends turned out to be that sort of person.
Where’s that factoid I read today? Ah, yes, a poll by the Economist. “Some 20% of respondents aged 18-29 think that the Holocaust is a myth” You hire these kids, it’s a one in five chance they believe the Holocaust never happened.
Well that’s horrifying.