It’s fun to read the tweets under #standwithpax. A few are serious and a lot more are sarcastic. Both sets are funny.
Mike Booth @somegreybloke
I’m going to go
#standwithpax and play the world’s tiniest violin whilst laughing.barefootwriter @bfwriter
if by unpopular you mean ignorant, incorrect, and harmful, then yes, we’re all mad at Pax for expressing unpopular opinions.
#standwithpaxThe New Bard @The NewBard
#standwithpax I don’t want to live in a country where free speech is punished and a man isn’t entitled to an opinion unless it’s popular.
#standwithpax because if you can’t exercise freedom of speech without a lynch mob coming after you, then freedom of speech does not exist.
Lynch mob!
Matthew Forney @realmattforney
#standwithpax because you shouldn’t lose your job because of your completely unrelated political views.
Not completely unrelated at all. Completely related is more like it. Toward the end of his post Ken White quotes one I hadn’t seen:
Pax Dickinson @paxdickinson
Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn.
Yeah. It’s related. Ken glosses it:
Pax Dickinson is apparently an officer within Business Insider, someone who supervises employees, and someone who interviews applicants to jobs at Business Insider. If anyone ever accused Business Insider and Pax Dickinson of sex discrimination in hiring or firing, or of workplace harassment or discrimination, that tweet would be useful evidence for the plaintiff, and might convince the jury of discriminatory intent on the part of a Business Insider officer whose actions are attributable to his employer. He has a First Amendment right to tweet that and cannot be prosecuted for it. Nor is the tweet, itself, a civil violation. But it’s potentially powerful evidence of how Business Insider is run, and it’s a freakishly reckless thing for an officer of a business to say in public.
And now he’s not an officer of that business any more.