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It is Okay to Think That Charlie Kirk was not Literally Jesus.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to get shot in the jugular for expressing controversial political opinions. I actually agreed with many of Charlie Kirk's controversial political opinions. The thing about controversial political opinions though, is that lots of people don't like them. If you are a person who does not like Charlie Kirk's political opinions, here are some things that would be perfectly understandable for you to think or feel upon hearing the news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed:
"Charlie Kirk once said gun rights are worth the cost of a few shooting deaths. Kinda funny now huh? I wonder if he's changed his mind."
"Sucks he died like that, but I'm kinda glad I don't have to see his tiny face spouting talking points anymore."
"Charlie Kirk was a massive hack. I think we should care about the kids shot at that school in Colorado more than him."
"Charlie Kirk wanted me kicked out of the country because of my political opinions. It's hard for me to feel bad for him."
To be clear, all of these are tasteless and (in my opinion) poorly thought-out, but they are well within the bounds of civil discourse. None of these are beyond the pale. None of these should get one fired from one's unrelated job. None of these are even close to inciting or advocating for violence.
I was shocked today when I saw a Republican Congressman announce a woke-era pressure campaign againt people who "belittled" the assasination. Apparently I have a much longer memory than many people. I still remember 2020. I still remember George Floyd. It wasn't just the riots, it wasn't just the demonization of physical policing tactics, it was the Orwellian psycholigical tyranny of not being able to express nuanced or contrary feelings about a tragic event. Never again. In a free society, people should be able to express their thoughts and feelings on major events, even if they aren't entirely thought-out or sanitized.
I decline to extend political or social rights to those who hate me that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future.
If you pride yourself on your memory, exercise it by recalling the legal term "hostile work environment", the similar terms that cover most social spaces, and the numerous examples of how they have been applied by courts nation-wide over the last few decades.
Anyone who is moved by appeals to free speech at this late date deserves their victimization. Free Speech is a spook. The First Amendment offers me no meaningful protection, and I see no benefit to compromising my interests to honor its thoroughly-desecrated corpse. Complying with your proposal will not delay by a single second the next attempt to censor and criminalize my beliefs and to render people like me unemployable when identified. I defy you to argue otherwise.
Principles are things you are willing to lose for. I decline to treat free speech as a principle.
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards? What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
"Our Indian developers are the cause of 95% or more of the issues we face (in terms of delivery speed of new features, software performance, and software stability). We could fire virtually all of the 200+ Indians we have writing terrible code and replace them with half a dozen American developers for roughly the same price (if not cheaper)."
I'd like to repeat that for female software devs. They're fine in
DevOpsEdit: Activities that are neither coding nor DevOps, and there are a golden few who actually can code, but there's also a surprising amount who, no matter how often it fails, insist on just copying whatever ChatGPT gives them.I've never see a female DevOps engineer (if by DevOps we mean a person that sets up software stacks, CI/CD pipelines and is responsible for the smooth running of software in general as opposed to implementing business-facing features). QA? Lots of 'em.
No, in this case I didn't mean Hackerman who sleeps in the server room and has admin rights on the entire company's software ecosystem.
Rather, Sybil and Jennifer who are responsible for incident handling, test schedule deconflicting and update management for a limited vertical and horizontal section of the stack.
Sybil and Dschennifer sound like they work in second-line support or QA to me.
Well, fine, it's not DevOps then.
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