For some time now, I've been assiduously avoiding posting about the politics of the day on this blog.
It's not because I'm not interested in politics. The members of my family are almost all political junkies; I've never failed to vote in any election where I was eligible to do so, and I check the day's political news, in both Canada and the U.S., several times each day, including Sundays and holidays. It's not because I don't have opinions on the topics of the day, either; if you've read any significant part of this blog, you know that I have plenty of opinions, and that I'm not terribly shy about sharing them. That is, after all, why I started a blog in the first place: to share my opinions on various topics of interest to me.
The reason that I've been avoiding posts about politics is twofold. One, political discussions on the internet tend to turn to shit very quickly, with toxic comment sections, personal attacks, gratuitous doxxing, and death threats, and who the fuck needs that in their lives? No, thank-you; I'll stick to bashing big corporations, which (a) provides plenty of material to write about, and (b) generally involves less of the typical internet unpleasantness.
The second reason, though, is both simpler and less selfish: I prefer not to post on topics where I have little, if anything, to add to the discussion. Whenever possible, I restrict myself to posts on topics where (a) I have something to say, that (b) I'm not seeing expressed elsewhere. More than once, I've deleted a partially-drafted post because I realized partway through that I wasn't saying anything of worth.
Yes, I've been guilty of the odd "+1" post that's little more than a link to an article that I liked and a comment that I agreed with it, but I try to keep that to a minimum. I'm basically a dilettante, well-read on a wide range of topics, with interests that are broad but shallow. I feel comfortable bringing together tidbits about statistics, public relations, history, and technology, synthesizing them into what I hope is a coherent world-view that minimizes the effect of hype culture on my behaviour and my life.
Politics feels different, though. It so often gets really personal, really quickly, with people mistaking arguments about identity for arguments about policy (and vice versa) in a way that makes them resistant to facts that contradict their worldviews, and unwilling to listen to people from the "other side." I like to think that I'm reasonably well-informed about politics and current events, but I'm not usually not an expert in either the issues involved, or the details of the relevant political processes; I'm certainly not likely to be recognized as an expert by either side of a political debate.
Every once in a while, though, I feel compelled to step out of my comfort zone. And the blowup around Google's firing of the "anti-diversity" engineer (a.k.a. TADE) feels like one of those times... in part because the discussion around the event seems to be revealing a fundamental misunderstanding about what free speech is and isn't, why democratic societies have and need it, and why and when it's perfectly acceptable to limit it... limitations that are already enshrined in law, and not particularly controversial.
First, let's start with what free speech is, and why democracies need it.