> As for dishonest people, I suppose I like to believe I can believe other Googlers, especially when there are so many of them in this case who were upset by th

> As for dishonest people, I suppose I like to believe I can believe other Googlers, especially when there are so many of them in this case who were upset by this. This touches on another problem area of ambiguity/clarity in my statement. We should question the reasonableness of the claim of being hurt - by which I not only mean "Were they really hurt?", but also "Is it reasonable for them to have been hurt?" I can choose to be deeply hurt and offended by almost anything. We must strike a balance between respecting peoples feelings, and not allowing manipulators to exploit that respect to unreasonably coerce our behavior. If you take 'respect for people's feelings' to an absurd extreme, we could create a world in which I could have you jailed for posing the questions you pose above. 'They hurt me.' The fact that some demonstrably ideologically intolerant people successfully pressured Google to fire someone for expressing reasonable opinions based on evidence - this suggests to me that our society has already crossed certain thresholds in the balance between "respect for claims of being hurt" and other societal values - such as the allowance of independent thought.