How can we miss you, if you won't go away?

[Update to this blog entry.]

So, those early comments by TADE (and no, I'm still not going to feed his ego by naming him on this blog) that he was examining all his legal options? You can ignore them. He is, 100% for certain, not suing Google or anybody else.

The first thing that any competent lawyer will tell you, once they agree to represent you on any matter, is to stop talking; your lawyers do all the necessary talking for you. This is partly because they get to bill you hundreds of dollars for every hour in which they do any work at all on your case, including media appearances, but it's also because judges, one of whom will preside over your lawsuit, tend to take a dim view of attempts by a complainant to try their case in the court of public opinion, rather than trying their case in, you know, an actual courtroom.

The fact that TADE still talking publicly (to the Wall Street Journal, on Reddit, and presumably to anyone else who'll listen, while he's still infamous enough make for an effective clickbait headline) is all the evidence you need that he has not yet secured legal representation. Which means either (a) that his talk of doing so was just talk, because he lacks the necessary resources to retain a lawyer, or (b) he tried to hire a lawyer, only to be turned away because his case is not winnable.

So, what's TADE trying to accomplish, with his "charm" offensive? I have no idea. I can't imagine he's making himself look any more attractive to future potential employers, though, almost all of whom would also have fired him for the level of insubordination that he displayed towards his last employer, and none of whom will be wanting to take someone onboard who's simultaneously unwilling to adhere to company policies, and highly likely to try to burn the place down behind him, when he leaves.

Oh, and Julian Assange's noises about offering him a job at Wikileaks? You can ignore that, too.

My thoughts on the topic of freedom of speech

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.