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Comment by james-mcelwain | Hacker News Reader

It definitely makes sense to have some kind of official policy about what kind of speech is acceptable, but I don't think it's possible to enumerate all opinions that are unacceptable in a reasonable way.

I'm almost certain MIT has an employee handbook that reasonably covers situations like this. If anything, it's a demonstration of favoritism that he wasn't fired in the past.

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> I don't think it's possible to enumerate all opinions that are unacceptable in a reasonable way.

The beauty of REAL freedom of speech (like we had in 1977 [1]) is that the answer to that is: none

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

I'm totally unsure how that's relevant -- we're discussing employee handbooks for private institutions. I'm very in favor of freedom of speech at the governmental level.

> I'm totally unsure how that's relevant -- we're discussing employee handbooks for private institutions. I'm very in favor of freedom of speech at the governmental level.

Because if i can lose my job over a statement and a mob reaction, the mob makes me unemployable since they scare other employers, i lose my livelihood, and thus my life. If I have no protection from that (enshrined in a law, like california actually has), in what way is speech free? It becomes more of: "speech only as authorized by the mob-du-jour".

So freedom of association doesn't matter?

you bring up an interesting point, freedom of association is also important, and it seems like those two are potentially in conflict over speech. I'd love to continue this debate, but HN's increased throttling of replies-to-replies makes it complicated. Can we continue over email? (mine is in my profile)

Freedom of association (or more specifically: the freedom to not associate) has limits; for example, freedom of association "doesn't matter" in the context of whether or not it's legal or moral to prohibit someone of a protected class from patronizing a business.

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