You believe that. I believe that. I'm sure my lawyer believes that. I'm sure Matt's does, too. I'd prefer not to have to convince a judge or jury to see it our way. If I were in the author's shoes, I don't know if I'd expose my company to that much of a legal risk with someone who's been acting "interestingly" recently.
I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why someone might not want to split legal hairs with their leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win such an argument in court.
I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law.
(I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at press conferences they called.)
>I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law.
Sounds exactly like one of the candidates running for POTUS!
All I know about the recent Matt and WordPress kerfuffle is what I've read here on HN. Based solely on what I've seen of his own comments here on these stories, I think you're right. What I meant in that sentence was "Matt's lawyers do, too", even if Matt might not think so.
One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about. He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe this bullshit."
By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for billable hours I completely believe it."
The red flag I keep an eye out for is redemptive rejection: treating rejection of one's arguments, whether by a person or the evidence, as evidence for it.
Most commonly this comes in the form of false victimhood, e.g. look at how hard they are trying to shut me down. Other times it manifests like this. The problem is it's a logical attractor; whatever belief it first attaches to, it monotonically increases faith in.
