But I don't think anybody did get fired? Who of the signees of the Harpers letter is actually being hurt? Even if they _were_ fired, why is that bad? Most of the people who signed that letter are professional writers in some form or another, and their job is to write stuff that people want to read. If people don't want to read it anymore because they write dumb stuff or sign their name to stupid letters, how is that anymore an issue of free speech than if I got fired for writing buggy code or insistently arguing that we should be coding everything in Perl 4?You can say all kinds of dumb shit and sign your name to stupid letters and other people get to call for you to be fired, and maybe you will be! Even after that, you can continue saying dumb shit and signing your name to stupid letters, and I can go write buggy Perl 4 code, and nobody can stop us! Your dumb letters might not get published in national magazines and I probably won't get paid much for my code but in neither case is this a violation of our free speech rights.
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