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This slashdot article has a big gap in it

1. Person publishes a thing with a title including the word “Question”

2. People say this title has some resonance to do with the Nazi genocide and ask him to change it

3. He refuses to change it

5. He gets expelled from the committee

You see the missing piece? Unlike the title, the body text doesn’t say he was expelled for the title or even for refusing to change it. It says he refused to change the title and then later was expelled. I could see a hypothetical situation in which he was totally in the right to refuse to change the title but acted like such a jerk in the ensuing debate that they fired him from the committee. We just don’t know. Imagine I publish a thing, my employer ask me to change the title, I say no, then the next time I go to work I steal all the furniture and they fire me. It would have the same pattern as the facts in the article.

Personally it seems very strange to fire him for using the word “Question” (if that’s what they did) but it also seems very strange for him to choose to die on that hill and not change the word if people find it really provocative (if that is what he did). “On the effects of undefined behaviour” seems a much better title than the one he chose for example. So it seems we’re lacking context here.




Is it dying on a hill or is it keeping up healthy boundaries and standing your ground?


I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. If the former, there are two problems with the "employer": (1) finding a problem where there is none, (2) firing a person for sticking to the common sense rather that giving in to meaningless accusations.


It seems like you are assuming quite a bit about 2.

I think what GP was getting at is that is something along the lines of if you were accused of misconduct, and in being called into your manager's office for them to ask you about it you behaved unprofessionally enough they no longer thought you were a good fit for the company regardless of whether the accusation was true, they are entirely justified in wanting to end employment. A falsehood can reveal a separate truth about someone.

E.g. Someone falsely says you are always late to group meetings for a group project, and in being questioned you start throwing out racial slurs. Whether you were late is now a lesser issue, and while you woulf be technically correct to say you were falsely accused of being late to a few meeting and were then fired, that isn't correctly relaying the relevant information about why you were fired.

I have no information about whether this is what happened, but I think this is what the GP was trying to express about the information we have as it was presented.


Maybe nobody can see the missing piece because there isn't one? Your whole scenario requires making up some additional incident. The more economical alternative is to go with the pieces we do have. A old medieval monk I've heard of recommended for that and against your way.




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