Childhood Sins
Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
in Purgatory
Most of us have said or done some stupid things in our youth. There are probably still archives of me laying down the law on USENET, being oh-so-certain about my opinions. (I was 17 - I think that comes with the territory.) Many of the opinions I expressed back then were rather naive, and less than helpful.
CNN reports that the newly-appointed editor of Teen Vogue magazine has been ousted before she even started work, based on bad publicity surrounding racist and homophobic tweets she wrote as a 17 year old high school student a decade ago.
There are several issues here. First - this is another reminder to today's kids that anything they write on the internet will follow them for life.
Second, if you're attacking someone for things they have said or done in the past, how long ago is reasonable? Ms McCammond has apologized for her youthful stupidity, and unreservedly accepts that the prejudice she expressed is wrong. Is she ever allowed to move past her mistakes, or should she be hounded out of a high profile job she gets in another five or ten years? Should teenagers who express unthinking prejudice be banned from any high-profile job for life?
CNN reports that the newly-appointed editor of Teen Vogue magazine has been ousted before she even started work, based on bad publicity surrounding racist and homophobic tweets she wrote as a 17 year old high school student a decade ago.
There are several issues here. First - this is another reminder to today's kids that anything they write on the internet will follow them for life.
Second, if you're attacking someone for things they have said or done in the past, how long ago is reasonable? Ms McCammond has apologized for her youthful stupidity, and unreservedly accepts that the prejudice she expressed is wrong. Is she ever allowed to move past her mistakes, or should she be hounded out of a high profile job she gets in another five or ten years? Should teenagers who express unthinking prejudice be banned from any high-profile job for life?
Comments
There are many influential people today who were swept along with the tide of others in their teens when they were naive and easily influenced, but whose offences were not recorded as it was BSM - that is, before social media.
Don't know. The publisher evidently thought it enough of liability. If she wasn't in a publicly exposed job maybe would not have been let go. Social media where you share your inner life with the world when you're not taking pictures of your food is a factor.
Though I think there's a useful distinction to be drawn between "That happened when I was a teenager" and "That happened when I had a different worldview than I have now". The second could be applied to offendors of any age, and is not reliant upon the idea that people of a certain cohort are to be consicdered a priori stupid.
Location is as important as age, I would suggest. Growing up in, say, San Francisco is likely to give you a different millieu than the proverbial Bumfuck, Nebraska and hence a different steer on what's acceptable. I'm a decade older than Ms McCammond and I shudder to think of the homophobic stuff I came out with at 15 (and that didn't come from home or church but from my peers). On the other hand if there are gay and/or Asian folk who feel uncomfortable working for Ms McCammond knowing what she said then I'm inclined to say that their right to feel safe at work comes first.
As someone who lives with bi-polar disorder, I've done allot of bad things. I've had lots of forgiveness, but there are some people who no longer wish to know me, and others I find difficult to be with because of my actions.
Personal relationships are different to jobs though. A job, a career, is only life in a limited and kind of distorted way. Personal relationships are what matter. When you do bad things you can break those relationships. But all is not lost. There is learning; there is growth. Hopefully this woman has learned that already.
Everyone should feel safe at work. Which means relationships with colleagues and bosses that are appropriately professional.
Thinking you've the right to object to beliefs that others once held before they graduated to the status of professional colleagues is absurd. And is in fact a failure to be appropriately professional...
There it is, in a nutshell. She's a journalist, and there are other outlets, all keen to attract younger readers. Though she might try a fair few speculative applications before approaching the Guardian.
I know you probably just meant "Bumfuck" as a generic term for a useless backwater, but I think terms like that are best avoided, given that aspersions on anal sex usually carry a homophobic significance.
(And no, I'm not casting stones from any lofty perch, as there are a few anti-gay slurs which I still fall into in everyday spontaneous cursing. But I try to avoid them in situations where I'm speaking more formally, and/or choosing my words in advance.)
Personally, I find "Buttcrack" is a good placeholder for a hick town. It carries the low connotations associated with the posterior, but avoids the stigmatization of anal sex. (Sorta like you can call someone a "dick" without insulting sexual intercourse.)
It was what it was. I was racist and homophobic for much longer that that.
I like it, but, we should forgive, understand, embrace our former selves.
I did wonder about that concern, and indeed googled it and couldn't find any indicators it was considered homophobic. I suspect (though I'm happy to be corrected) that it's similar to "butthurt" in registering as a false positive.
Well, the literal meaning of the phrase would be "to have anal sex" or "an instance of having anal sex". So, I'm not really sure how else that could be read.
I guess we can let others weigh in on their view, if they so choose, and if people think it's positive, or don't think it worth expressing an opinion on, I will bow to that consensus.
(FWIW, the gay filmmaker John Waters apparently has no problem with "c*******er" used as an insult, so milages do vary. I personally think "suck" by itself to mean "be of low quality" is okay, because it's now almost completely divorced from its original sexual meaning.)
But my actions were norty in the extreme. (ADHD impulsive teens tend to do-then-think, I learned a lot!). The photos, if dug up, wouldn’t have been good for me in later life.
*shudders*
It seems like Condé-Nast already has a poor reputation for its treatment of non-white journalists, and hiring McCammond without making any comment on the lines of 'She did say these things but she recognises they were unacceptable' didn't exactly inspire confidence that they understood the problem.
If they needed to show their commitment to diversity in a hurry, sacking someone before they were even appointed is probably a nice cheap way of doing so.
Except that I don't think it does that. The fact that she had written these tweets was already known. They hired her without comment. A big advertiser said "why did you hire the racist tweeter?" and put a hold on a large advertising contract. Teen Vogue caved and she walked. That doesn't show Teen Vogue's commitment to anything.
This is national news in Canada CBC Radio One. Should his deeds, not participatory directly in atrocities, be held against him?
I didn't say it was an effective way of doing so ... just that it probably seemed the most expedient way at the time. IOW, she is being made a scapegoat for Condé-Nast's previous bad behaviour
Well, except their advertising revenue...
I don't know anything about Ms. McCammond's background, but I do find it believable that some people may have grown up in situations where that kind of thing is not as obviously unacceptable as it is to some of us. The other thing that comes to mind is that at least in Canada, someone can commit quite serious crimes up to and including the age of 17 and nobody will ever know about them as long as they stay out of trouble afterward. Personally, I don't think wanting to ruin someone's career over something they did at the age of 17 shows good moral instincts.
Tidied quoting code. BroJames, Purgatory Host.
This is an interesting case. Technically, he is being deported for lying on his immigration application (in case anyone wondered why the US asks if you were a Nazi, or a prostitute, or intending to overthrow the US government by force, or whatever else it asks, this is why.)
A holocaust survivor quoted in that article believes that he lied about his involvement with Nazi death squads when he immigrated to Canada in 1960 because he was guilty. This is possible, although he's not being charges with any war crimes. It certainly also seems plausible to me that he lied because he was ashamed of what he had been involved in, and wanted to consign it to the past.
I'm not sure what to think in this case. In general, I support charging elderly Nazi fugitives with war crimes - you shouldn't get to evade talking responsibility for your crimes by having successfully hid for some period of time - but the man in question isn't being charged with a war crime, he's just being relocated from Canada to Germany, with the prima facie cause being the fact that he lied on his immigration application.
Nazis, death squads, and the Holocaust clearly make this a highly emotive issue. In the back of my mind is a case with similar logical structure, but a less serious back story: there was a case of an employee who had lied on a job application about having a degree. The employee had worked for quite a number of years, successfully, until some background check or other turned up the fact that they didn't actually have the degree they had claimed. I don't remember now whether they were fired or not. I suspect they were, otherwise it wouldn't have been much of a story.
The point I think is that if Oberlander is held to account why not McCammand? He is turned down to be a Canadian due what he did, if he'd told the truth in 1954, then would have had his past also held against him.
Seems to me that there are people who want to ruin other people as a way of proving the importance of the belief system against which those others have transgressed. Punishing the heretics serves as an ego boost, proving that one's own orthodoxy is important.
And then there are those with no desire to ruin others at all but who fear for their own ruin if they aren't seen to respond to the concerns of the twittering mob.
And both of these are thoroughly unhealthy dynamics within our society.
Countries, generally, treat immigration as very much a privilege. I'm generally a fan of open borders - I think people should be able to move wherever they like with few restrictions - but basically no country looks at it that way. So while I personally don't see much difference between "I want to work for your company" and "I want to live in your country", that's not the view that governments take.
There were a large number of Germans of Oberlander's age who had some involvement with atrocities. Most of them were not major players, were not prosecuted for war crimes, and lived out their lives in Germany. I find it hard to consider "living in Canada" as any different from "living in Germany" on this front.
On the other hand, I briefly had a landlady while I was a student in the UK who was also a German emmigrant, liked to play German marching band music, and in my presence referred to the SS as "a fine body of men" and made several similar comments about the genetic superiority of certain kinds of people. So I moved out.
People who accuse others of malign motives run a risk of bearing false witness.
Take care.
Anyway, being opposed to racism and homophobia isn't a belief system. It's common decency.
If someone had been caught nicking sweets from the corner shop as a child, it probably wouldn't trouble you too much to put their adult self in a position of trust. If they'd been caught embezzling from their previous employer, you're probably less likely to trust them with your finances.
That's not about whether there was sin, or whether the sin has been forgiven - it's about risk.
She was held to account in 2019 and apologised for the tweets then. So the question is whether she was held to account enough. Which is different from grizzled old Nazis who have never been held to account.
Well, no-one refused to employ anyone. What has happened is in fact Capitalism in action - the people with the money threatened to withhold it and the company followed the money.
What makes this particularly difficult is we don't know what these past posts actually said.
The ones I saw were pretty tame, as such things go. The homophobic ones consist of her using "gay" as a slur (You're so gay / that's so gay etc.). The racist ones - one was a grumble about a TA on a course she was taken that ended, sarcastically, "Thanks, Asian TA". One was about "asian eyes". I think another said "that's so asian" in a disparaging way.
Link here
You must lead a much more orderly life than I do. I don't even remember the stupid things I posted last week, let alone a decade ago.
We should probably be aware of the nature of their crime before we come to a decision on that. Some jobs in the UK require a DBS check that will, in fact, prevent an employer from hiring people with certain convictions, no matter the circumstances.
As they say, it depends. I make garbage bins. If someone comes to me and asks for a job, telling me that they've just finished serving 6 years gaol for company fraud, and are spending the remaining 2 years on parole, I'd give that person a job on the production line, but certainly nowhere that gave access to finances. In fact, I'd probably give that person priority in appointment in the hope of assisting rehabilitation.
That's a pretty straightforward example. Don't ask me what I'd do if the sentence had been for child sexual abuse. I'd like to think I'd employ, and for the same reasons, but not sure that I would.
This is a good point.
The argument against forgiveness is the view that people do bad things because they are fundamentally bad people.
Most of the time this is false. Usually people do bad things in order to fulfil ordinary short-term wants because in the heat of the moment they don't see or attend to the reasons why they shouldn't. And they can and often do learn better and grow out of it, if allowed to.
But, the argument goes, sometimes an act is so horrific that it demonstrates a twisted mind. A permanent characteristic, a bent towards wrongdoing that will never go away. Psychopathy.
When Karl says it's an attempt to portray his political views about race and sexual orientation as being above debate, as something that only someone with a twisted mind could ever doubt or disagree with. So that offenses against his views (as to what it is OK or not OK to say about minority groups) are unforgivable because they show a deformed character, a lack of that decency which is a component of a normal mind.
And it's nonsense. Because anyone's attitudes to other groups is formed by their experience (both first-hand and through media) and can change.
But on the other hand if someone has a "spent conviction" - and this does vary depending on the type of crime and the sector applied for - they do not have to disclose it in their application and even if they do the employer is not permitted to reject their application for that reason.
It seems to me that you've constructed a strawman way larger than is justified by Karl's post.
Oh and trying to frame basic human dignity as a matter of political opinion about which reasonable people can disagree is bullshit.
Broadly speaking, the more powerful and prominent the role, the less room there is for giving someone a chance to mend their ways. Managerial positions should be under particular scrutiny.
(I was lucky to work in a sector which was not, at the time, 'corporate'. We could behave like public servants, and often did. Now the sector is corporate, and this is no longer the case. In fact the dissonance of trying to be a public servant in that environment is extra-stressful, and it might be easier to do something honestly corrupt in telephone scams or double-glazing).
Sin may well be sin in the eyes of God, but crimes are not all equal.
No, the logic is clear. We forgive the sort of youthful indiscretion that is a giving in to the sort of temptation that anyone might experience. We remember forever the sort of act that reveals someone's innermost self to be twisted; such a person will always be a danger to others.
To anyone with a sense of perspective, expressing in public an unflattering view of groups to which one does not belong is an act in the former category.
I agree that the notion that asians are people entitled to the full measure of basic human dignity is so obviously true that there is no scope for reasonable people to disagree.
The relative merits of Asian and western cultures on the other hand, and the extent to which the people of Asian descent whom one encounters exhibit characteristics of Asian cultures, seems like something on which people of goodwill might reasonably differ.
For example, is approval of some particular asian culture as valuing hard work and family ties not a political opinion ?
Just stop, Russ. This isn't even vaguely coded racism. It's just plain old racism.
You assume. Desist.
If you assume that someone ascribes to a particular culture, or set of behaviours, based on the colour of their skin, the ethnicity of their name, or whatever, then that's racist. Even if the assumption you're making is a generally positive stereotype. And there's plenty of evidence that actual people from Asian backgrounds are harmed by these kinds of "super-minority" stereotypes.
And, as @Doc Tor points out, Asia is quite large. There are a lot of countries in it, and a lot of distinct cultures. They're not all the same.