The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.

Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.

I’m not following you. What you think and what you say or do are entirely different, right? We think all kinds of things very quickly about all kinds of topics, and just as a practical measure we can only say or do do a small fraction of those.

So right now I’m not seeing the Mel Gibson connection, because that was a claim about his actions.

Exactly. Reverse DNS lookup matters in some situations.

It’s certainly true that the system is broken, but at the same time you’re suggesting we should forgive HR employees for the bad stuff they do, and I don’t think that’s how morality works.

Not only that, we all understand that sometimes employees don’t have control of a situation and they’re going to follow company policy or go along with their bosses. But we can see through their words and their body language how they feel about it, and we can recognize small actions that they could take to make a bad situation slightly less bad. In my experience it’s very rare that you will encounter such behavior in HR, because the vast majority of HR workers are perfectly happy to f*** us over as much as they can.

Last year I was talking with a veteran coworker who was worried about where the company was going to end up in 10 years, but my contract ends in a year and will not be renewed. I told her openly, they’re not paying me to think about 10 years from now, they’re paying me to make the next year a good year, and I don’t really care about the long-term future cuz I won’t be here. She was furious, but she wasn’t furious enough to go get me a long-term contract. I think she never saw the hypocrisy; even today she still thinks that I’m a bad worker.

Of course what you wrote is not what it actually says in the Bill of Rights.

You can buy loyalty. Give someone a high paying 3-year contract and they’ll probably work to the end of it. But of course HR doesn’t want to hear that.

What you just described is a system that mistreats your workers. Those temporary hires, if they lose their jobs, they can’t put food on the table. But if the company loses a temporary worker, it’s not going to be troubled, they’re just going to go hire another person.

That all being said, if you’re working under contract and your company has robust protections for retaliation by employers, some of the risk of telling them in advance goes away. That’s great, but there’s still some remaining risk. Many bosses will be vengeful, bitter, and they may sabotage your work however they can for the last few weeks or months. And you won’t be able to stop them, because you’re leaving, so even if you filed an internal complaint, it wouldn’t go anywhere.