Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Spoken like a truly clueless lawyer.

Life involves risk. It involves bad things, abuses, and people fighting back against abuses, and it's a constant push and pull.

Some shithead saying, "Let's pass a law..." is the autistic flag waver channeling traffic down that road to hell paved with good intentions.

You cannot effectively bar people from fucking via policy. All this does is put people in horrible situations. If a person in power is forcing himself on others, those others have avenues to make complaints. They can bring down the careers of such abusive people, as we're seeing every day (and get nice settlements in the process). Having some twit lawyer craft a zero tolerance rule precluding people from fucking it is both embarrassing and disheartening. And it did no favors for Katie Hill, who does not deserve to lose her job because her bitter spouse ratfucked her with revenge porn.

Every company I've ever worked for has had a policy against superiors and subordinates having a relationship. Why is this any different? The rule (and it's a rule, not a law) doesn't prevent such relationships (let alone preclude people from fucking), as everyone knows and this case shows, but it shifts the incentives to deter the subordinate from exploiting the work relationship in the personal relationship, which seems like a good thing. Just because there's a rule doesn't mean that Katie Hill was going to lose her seat,* and it seems to me much more likely that she quit because of the revenge porn, which the ethics rule had nothing to do with.

* I.e., to my understanding the rule doesn't impose any particularly penalty for violations.