People always whine at me when I post certain things because it’s “too political,” or I need to be more forgiving of certain dullards, or most amusingly “what if your boss or a potential employer sees it?”
Politics and Religion
When it’s “too political,” that almost always translates as “how dare you tell the truth about my guy?” Funny how these same people will gleefully post outright lies about The Other Guy whenever they feel like it, and when you point out their lies they immediately start dodging. You know, stuff like petty personal attacks, accusing you of making a personal attack when you said nothing whatsoever about them, or dragging out a whole bushel of logical fallacies that make you wonder if you aren’t actually talking to Kent Hovid. Or my personal favorite: “I’m entitled to my opinion.” Sure you are, but you aren’t entitled to your own facts.
The same applies to religion, or more specifically my lack thereof. Don’t push your religion on me, and I won’t respond by pointing and laughing at what you believe. Thanks to my fiancee and some of my long-standing lifestyle choices, I’m fairly well connected to the local Pagan community. I’ve made websites for a few, I help run a booth at Renaissance and Pagan festivals, and a lot of our friends belong to some pretty interesting religious traditions. Among other things, the officiant at our wedding was a Druid high priest. He’s a good dude. They know I’m not a believer, but I’m also not a bigot.
Idiots and Forgiveness Thereof
As for needing to be more forgiving of blithering idiots, nope. I expect people to exercise basic critical thinking and have at least a high school education. I don’t expect anyone I interact with to have an advanced degree in anything, and I try not to communicate like I do. There are reasons I write at a 6th to 9th grade level, mainly for wider readability. My target audience is “people who know their heads from holes in the ground,” not “lawyers and biochemists.” My audience also isn’t people who refuse to interact with reality and think their ramblings are equal to peer-reviewed science. If you think a global pandemic is a conspiracy spread by The Other Side and not being able to go out to the bar is tantamount to the Holocaust I really don’t care what you think, and I certainly don’t see any need to have any respect for you or what comes out of your feeding-hole.
What About Employers?
Then you have the issue of employers, whether current or potential. This website isn’t private. I talk about and have a Devil Monkey Games poster on my wall at work. Devil Monkey links back here on occasion. I’ve openly talked about this blog to my coworkers. Anyone reading my resume can pretty easily find this site. Nothing I post here, or at my other websites, is objectionable to any decent human being. I’m not hosting anything illegal or obscene. I’m not advocating a single criminal activity outside of an in-game context over at Devil Monkey. There’s no hate speech anywhere on anything I run. I also don’t badmouth my employer. That’s largely because there’s very little I could really go on about, but also because I’m a professional and operate according to a very simple policy of “I do my job, and I go home.”
Contract eligibility based on what I’ve written goes both ways.
I’ve turned down web and code clients for not meeting my basic ethical standards. Had a white supremacist try to get me to make his political campaign website once. Yeah, no. I’ve had potential clients try to get tech help for white supremacist or Christian dominionist games or apps. Nope, not doing it.
If a potential employer sees anything I’ve written here and decides not to employ me based on that, I probably dodged a bullet. I’m not going to work for a place that effectively demands I march in lockstep with their religious or political beliefs, or worse, highly questionable ethics. Especially when that marching is expected to take place on my own time and nowhere near my workplace.