Is PG necessarily defending himself, personally? What he's saying applies to everyone who might want to say something online, from Google executives to janitors. Furthermore, no matter how much you have it's still possible for someone to harm you unfairly. "PG is a billionaire" doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to do something morally wrong that results in him being worse off. Rich people deserve all of the same standards of fairness that anyone else does.
paulg is a good rhetorician: he doesn't actually defend either himself or others in this post.
What he does defend is an orthodoxy that presently enriches and empowers him, and that ensures brutal consequences for those less powerful than him. A prevailing (and legitimate!) complaint against social media justice is that it leaves vulnerable people (like your janitor) unemployed and outcast; this simply isn't possible in a society that has strong employment protections. But this constrains the power of companies to arbitrarily fire people, and paulg's material wealth is substantially dependent on that never happening.
I feel like arguing over "no, your beliefs are the orthodoxy!" is counterproductive when the point is something we can all agree on, which is that everyone's ideas should be tolerated, orthodoxy or not.
It absolutely is counterproductive! It's also a form of gaslighting: we have a problem in this country (assuming that you're also American) with extrajudicial murder of black and brown people. Instead of talking about that and how we've gotten to this point, we have to to rehash the feelings of an extremely powerful man who is anxious about feeling vulnerable on the Blue Bird Site for his opinions. It's perfectly fine to talk about that; I wish we wouldn't do it under the pretense (and abuse) of terminology like "privilege."
> when the point is something we can all agree on, which is that everyone's ideas should be tolerated, orthodoxy or not.
Except that we don't agree on this: I do not believe that everyone's ideas should be tolerated. I think there are ideas that are analytically incompatible with my existence, and that something roughly resembling the paradox of tolerance[1] applies to them. I've written up a more constructive summary of my opinions here[2][3].
