What you write can (and should?) be held against you.

So here's a question that's been on my mind:  How much of what you say on a blog should reasonably be held against you?  An Alaska blogger recently lost her job for running an extremely nasty blog on the tiny Alaska town where she was news director at an NPR station.  The locals eventually found the blog and they were not happy.  Now I really can't find much pity here.  People are always doing this sort of thing; especially transplants in rural areas on the assumption that country folk are too dumb to use the internet or not nosey enough to google the names of people they know (The first is just insulting and kind of stupid.  The second is amazingly stupid since one stereotype about small towns that is definitely true is that the citizens are nosey as heck) and it they're always surprised when it blows up in their faces. Posting a blog like chillyhell about the town you live in is like playing with gasoline and matches.  Fun sure, (and yes it is fun we all know fire is fun let's not deny it) keep it up long enough though and it's likely to burn you.  Any sensible person should know this.

But behind that there's a more interesting question:  Is it ever morally justifiable to fire someone for what they post on a blog?  To me it seems to depend on who they are and what they post.  Suppose you're a campaign worker and post long rants about how the folks in congressional district X are mouth breathing morons who ought to be put in a zoo.  Once you're found out keeping you on the payroll is not going to do anything to get your candidate elected; just the opposite in fact.  And since that's why they pay your salary, well they'd be fools not to let you go.  Not only that but blogs aren't like bitching to your coworkers over drinks, mom and dad on the phone, or friends via email.  Everyone can read them.  So once certain lines are crossed in what someone says it seems reasonable that various employers might justifiably have grounds to can you for what you say on a blog.  After all, it can hurt the organizations' images and play heck with morale and employees ability to work with one another.  I know that if I took it into my head to trash a prof in my department I happened not to like online and at length I wouldn't be surprised if I got called into the chair's office and got read the riot act (in fact I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's all that happened to me).

But yeah, "once certain lines are crossed" just where do we draw those lines?  Well anything personal about someone who isn't a public figure seems to me to be in danger of crossing those lines.  Hillary Clinton, Mitch McConnell, Kent Conrad, etc.  all chose to put themselves in the limelight.  If you just need to make fun of someone; at least make fun of someone who has in some way asked for it.  What's more we have a compelling interest in making being able to discuss these people even in the roughest possible terms.  But can anyone really tell me that anyone besides the blogger and his or her friends has a compelling interest in trashing a few poor yokels no one's ever heard of before or that these people somehow deserve it?  Seems bad enough to be trapped in rural Alaska.  Anyway to some extent it seems common sense.  Within limits we think hating an otherwise decent person for his political opinions is unjustifiable, but hating someone for saying snarky, hurtful things about people we know and like, well that's a different thing entirely.