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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

All the comments on this thread will be exactly the same as the comments on the Eich threads from years ago. I'm reminded of what Talleyrand wrote about the Bourbons: they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Look: nobody should ever lose his job for voicing political opinions in his capacity as a private human being --- and yes, this principle applies to political opinions you or I don't like. What's going on right now is no different from 1950s blacklisting except that the sides are flipped. If you object to McCarthyism and don't object to this, then you're just a partisan unmoored to any principle of discourse higher than getting your team to win at any cost. You can be that way if you want, but you should at least be honest with yourself about it.

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He didn't lose his job for voicing a political opinion. He lost his job because they started having real financial impact (contractors dropping out etc.). Are you going to decree that others are forbidden to react to his comments?

I'm not going to engage at this level of the conversation. I've seen enough of this stuff to know that what's really going on.

I think there's a set of political statements that you believe should not result in firing no matter the financial consequences. That makes you a hypocrite, but that's okay: everyone is a hypocrite these days.

These days, every conversation is about scoring points for a side, not agreeing on universal principles everyone can agree to live under. On Monday, someone will espouse principle X if it hurts someone on the other team, and then on Tuesday say X doesn't apply to someone on his side. Yeah, okay.

The bottom line is this: if normal participation in the political process costs you your job, then you're not living in a free country, and I don't really care about the pretzel logic people use to justify creating our current atmosphere of terror. Either you can speak or you can't.

What does this have to do with living in a free country? This isn’t the US government arresting someone because they’re pro-life. It’s a private company firing someone who disrupted their business interests. Pretty sure the US government is still one of the most fierce protectors of free speech and natural rights among developed nations last time I checked.

Your qualm is with cultural intolerance for conservative ideas. Which I agree is valid. But yeah, sorry, if you’re running a business and can’t understand that your business partners will be potentially offended by your own political statements, you deserve to get fired. Let’s not pretend this was some no-name engineer at a tech company in SV who got canned because they expressed a normal political opinion and their coworkers “just didn’t like it”. He’s the CEO and is the ultimate ambassador of the company and has a responsibility to read the room. Would you expect BMW or Mercedes to keep their CEOs if they made political statements about the human rights abuses and economic sabotage conducted by China? Let’s be real.

Do I sympathize with him that he freely spoke his mind and was inherently punished for it? Yes, in principle. But he’s a complete idiot for thinking he can do so without consequences in his position. There are always going to be cultural factors intwined in economics and sometimes they are not fair, but that’s the way the world has always worked.

The Hollywood blacklist was run by private companies too. A country isn't just its government. A country is its norms, people, and culture. And if the culture creates an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship, that fear is no less real just because the government hasn't entered the picture.

> Let’s not pretend this was some no-name engineer at a tech company in SV who got canned because they expressed a normal political opinion and their coworkers “just didn’t like it”.

That happens all the time. You just usually don't hear about it on the news. A lot of people also keep their mouths shut, both inside and outside work, because they know that they're surrounded by people chomping at the bit to get someone fired for having the wrong opinions. After the Eich affair, lots of people adopted a policy of no public donations for anything whatsoever.

This is not normal and it's not healthy.

Take the CEO’s tweet and imagine that instead of running a game studio, he instead ran:

- a women’s wellness lifestyle brand

- a healthy meal delivery service

- a government IT contractor

- a pickup truck accessories manufacturer

- a gun manufacturer

- a Christian publisher

Draw the line for me when you think he would not be cancelled. See the point, here? Context is everything. This is the opposite of McCarthyism.

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