I agree with you in principle, but the second you make a public blog post, especially a controversial one, these days assume it's public forever. Someone intell

I agree with you in principle, but the second you make a public blog post, especially a controversial one, these days assume it's public forever. Someone intelligent enough to do attempt a PhD should know this. Him making it private was a futile attempt based in naïveté. I've been in a similar position, saying something incendiary on a large corporation's public intranet comment section. What I said was more objective and pointing to a specific instance that was very fair to criticize and ultimately damaging to the company, but the next day I was well aware the cat was out of the bag I needed to defend my position with logic and reason and not try and hide it. In fact I emailed my manager immediately the next morning, saying that I was worried about the blowback and linking to the comment. I feel for the author, because the anxiety was definitely a ohh shit moment. Looking back, I probably shouldn't have made the public comment in the first place because it was emotionally driven and it did hurt my advancement.