"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It's been protected since 1791.

I expect that general anxiety about anti-Semitism is driving this. Like it or not, condemnation of Israel comes with certain baggage, and as can be seen on campuses throughout the Western world, criticism of Israel can turn into anti-Zionism which then turns into anti-Semitism very quickly. The lines are very thin. The business world is very risk averse, and coming down on the wrong side of this particular debate can have a whole lot of consequences. Beyond that, of course, Alphabet is a business, not a society for activists, and while it may tolerate certain kinds of activism that may not be perceived as threatening the bottom line, right now, criticism of Israel is just a step too far.

Clearly this is a great step forward for humanity.

Well, I'm living it. Perhaps I'm lucky, or perhaps it's because I'm late in my career and I have enough experience to have that luxury, but I definitely choose who I work for.

In fact, I have for a long time:

Back around 2000, I had an opportunity to work at Citrix. I didn't really know who Citrix was back then. but they were already big and definitely an attractive employer to land a job at.

They came to the offices of the company I was working for back then to hunt for potential recruits, because my company was closing and they were nice enough to organize job interviews in their facilities before throwing everybody out.

So I got interviewed by the Citrix head hunters. When they explained what Citrix did, how they had a tight partnership with Microsoft, and would I like to join the team, I told them "Thanks but no. If you're in cahoots with Microsoft, I'll decline if you don't mind." Then I walked out of the room. Them guys couldn't believe that this 30-something junior programmer just blew them off, because they expected everybody to want a job at Citrix really bad :)

So yeah, if you don't feel like working for certain companies, unless you're desperate for the money, just don't.

If I see you for defamation because you claimed I was a thief, that is indeed retaliation.

It's only a problem if you seek employment with companies that have no ethics.

Getting fired for protesting unethical things your employer engages in is something to be proud of, especially when you're willing to endanger a cushy or prestigious position at Google. If I ran a company, I'd hire someone like that in a heartbeat.

âoeBig River Servicesâ? Come on guys, thats not hard to figure out :)

Maybe Republicans really like dick picks

Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

Also, it's Türkiye. Because Türkiye saw how well the rebranding worked out for Myanmar and decided it wanted nothing to do with dumb flightless birds from now on.

I think a lot of Linux users will wait a bit to get the bleeding edge from now on...

for the rest of his working life?

I admire him for doing that. He essentially torpedoed his entire career for the sake of doing the right thing.

Is there some other strategy that is better? It's hard to see what the "wise" strategy would be for dealing with an aggressive nuclear-armed dictatorship that may or may not be collapsing politically.

Certainly "let Russia do what it wants because they might nuke us otherwise" feels a lot like paying the Dane-geld; as soon as they realized that was our strategy, they'd control us with it.