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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

That’s like suing people for telling others that you’re gay. That’s a standard of liability people would never rally behind, one which prevents you from speaking truthfully at the cost of another person.

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Not quite. He didn't write the memo to say he's a misogynist or a political conservative. He wrote a memo implying the women who worked with him may not be as competent as the men.

Now replace "women" with any other group, such as people of color, Jews, armed forces veterans or Republicans, and see how it goes.

I’m talking about the liability of somebody sitting in the same context, wanting to talk about it.

If someone distributes a memo that's likely to alienate half of their colleagues, the first thing I'll question is their lack of judgement.

If he was uncertain about hiring policies and thought those were negatively affecting productivity, he should have taken the question to his manager or to HR, along with some evidence.

I’m talking about the liability of people sitting in the same context. Are you still talking about what James should or shouldn’t be doing? I’m talking about whether you should incur legal risk for leaking facts about people likes James.

If he wrote that on a memo and distributed it to a dozen colleagues, it's doubtfully a secret. If he were fired for being gay, that'd be against the law on pretty much every civilized country and a couple that wouldn't qualify.

> If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.

This is the original post I'm responding to. If I found an old blog post of yours which revealed life-altering information, should I be sued if I send it to a reporter?

You two are having very different arguments.

You shouldn't make extreme claims about what other people supposedly said without showing evidence.

I am afraid what he was saying was that the current policy for attracting women to tech might be inefficient. He also proposed a bunch of policies that might make tech more attractive to women.

It's fine to disagree with him, it's not to missrepresent what he said.

It's perfectly fine to misrepresent what he said - consider that about 50% of the commenters in this entire thread so just that with no repercussions.

No such memo exists. Why would you make that up?

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