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Comment by kabouseng | Hacker News Reader

James Damore certainly lost.

No, he was fired because he very loudly and publicly contradicted his employers' stated policies[1]. His ideas didn't "lose", not in the free speech sense everyone is yelling about. There's not a poster here who doesn't know what he said (we spent A LOT more than 200 comments on that one!).

Nor was he suppressed: he's still speaking, on the same subject! Hell, he's surely making more now as a right wing martyr than he ever was as a low level hacker for Google.

[1] I mean, people get fired for this all the time, like those folks Amazon canned a few months back for union organizing with employer resources. You only care about this one guy because he happens to play for Your Team.

What he posted was on an internal message board specifically for employees to discuss controversial subjects. It was only public because another google employee got upset and made it public.

I probably should have said "broadly", I guess. But I still don't see how that differs from the union folks, who used an internal messaging system to notify other employees about their rights.

Again, I can't help but think what you people really want is the inalienable right, not to "free speech", but to be Offensive Without Consequence. And again, Damore is a genuine celebrity now, he's a very bad example of the kind of repressive woke hegemony you're invoking.

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