[philwelch]

I'm not sure if you're being defensive or cynical here. It's true that people have always lost their jobs and careers (sometimes lives!) for voicing unpopular opinions.

What's interesting is how people's moral judgment of that correlates with their sympathy for the particularly unpopular opinion in question. Lots of people lost their jobs and careers for voicing opinions that were sympathetic to Communism, and we call that "McCarthyism" and "a witch hunt". This guy loses his job and many of us would cheer for it.

[Lagged2Death]

I don't know that much about McCarthyism but I think it's safe to guess that you know less. It was considered a witch hunt because nobody cared about facts or evidence, the spectacle was the point. Victims we're persecuted because they were juicy, suceptible targets, not because of anything they did or didn't do.

The situation we're discussing here is pretty different.

[philwelch]

> It was considered a witch hunt because nobody cared about facts or evidence, the spectacle was the point. Victims we're persecuted because they were juicy, suceptible targets, not because of anything they did or didn't do.

You're right--you don't know a lot about McCarthyism. The "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were blacklisted by the film industry (private employers making employment decisions!) were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA, an organization that was directly controlled and financed by an adversarial world power. There was substance behind the spectacle.

As for people being accused of things without evidence--well, witness the people in this thread who keep repeating the lie that the author of the manifesto considers his women coworkers less capable than he is, the outright fantasizing in OP about the author getting punched in the face, etc. Looks pretty spectacular to me.

[Lagged2Death]

The "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were blacklisted by the film industry (private employers making employment decisions!) were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA...

Yes, but 1) that was just the tip of the iceberg labelled "McCarthyism," and 2) even at the time, the issue wasn't that they had joined a political party, the issue was what that party proposed to achieve.

In the case of the Google's manifesto, I don't see anyone upset that the author holds an unpopular opinion or that he publicized his unpopular opinion; it's the content of the opinion itself that's at issue.

Both McCarthy himself and the Googler in question here tried to harm other people's careers by spreading untruths in a self-aggrandizing way. That seems like the most natural parallel to me.