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Comment by tj-teej | Hacker News Reader

You should not be put in prison for writing what you think - I think any company should be able to fire people for publicly making statements which are antithetical to the company's values.

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This was _not_ public. It was internal for Google employees. It was made public by someone who disagreed and resorted to publicly sharing the memo.

The fact that Google has not addressed this is a more damning condemnation of their culture than anything else.

Oh wow. Yeah, the person who leaked the internal email should have been fired. That's crazy. I feel for Damore.

I think google is responsible for encouraging an employee to voice opinions and then fire the employee for saying 'the wrong thing'.

I also believe all the google employees that physically threatened damore should receive jail time, and those that verbally did so to get the can.

I believe employers have a right to fire employees for speech. But as we see industry power condense to a few megacorps, ones that play gatekeeper to information access, we should look at why we value freedom of speech at the national level and be more open minded about freedom of speech and political expression in other contexts. I don't buy the cliche "it's not freedom from consequences" argument (government couldn't say jail is just a consequences, so freedom of speech does imply no consequences within its context) and I don't buy this "we can't tolerate intolerance" argument either, as there seems to be an increasingly narrow point of views that at least some people won't label intolerant (or more common, smear by association by implying your views are associated with intolerant ones)

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