This is such a funny discussion because everyone should be taking a step back.

This donation was motivated by Jim Ryan distasteful comments in which he trivialized the struggle for reproductive rights by going on and on about his cat birthdays in the message saying that Sony wanted to stay neutral.

Neutral is ok. You don't want to take side in the culture war, then ok do it. Just don't speak about your cats in the same breath.

Secondly, and I will maybe shock you, those who are educated and have purchasing power are mostly pro abortion. You can spin it as much as you want but largely the consumers are largely pro choice.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018-demographic-tables.aspx

This is a poll which is heavily skewed to favor the pro choice position, as a lot of polls are reporting a lower share of US citizen who are pro-life. You can still see that:

Young people (future consumers)
Educated people (Future policy makers and future leaders)
People who earn a lot of money (Consumers + maybe shareholders)

These three groups are pro choice. Now you can debate all you want about why when how. The fact is that, people who are important for companies are actually (edit because I wrote pro-life instead of pro-choice:) pro-choice and if this part of their most important values, then they don't want to see companies trivializing the discourse.

This small time donation is an attempt to repair the PR catastrophe created by Jim Ryan. Nothing else.

Okay, fair. Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered if Jim Ryan didn't send such a God awful email which trivialised the issue by immediately banging on about his cats and then saying he likes dogs cause they're obedient...Pretty weird thing to point out when you've just sent an email essentially telling your employees to shut up, almost feels passive aggressive to me, I like dogs cause they're obedient, you should be obedient too.

But if Sony doesn't want to comment on it then whatever, don't comment on it at all, I still don't think they should muzzle individual studios or employees on the issue though, Sony may be Japanese but many of these studios are American and have their own thoughts and opinions on the matter and are ultimately ran by individual people who are looking out for their employees.

good for them i guess

Maybe it's a cultural thing? I don't really find it offensive to talk about other 'simple' things in the same email. Apparently that's his normal rambling in his emails and the statement is the extra. He did put the statement above the cat story...

Would it have been better as a separate email? Would that not just put more emphasis on the 'stay inline' part. As a friendly reminder to be respectful to other's opinions, seems about right to me to add it into the weekly 'my life' update. Yet in the 'west' nowadays everything is dissected fully for 'outrage' potential.

Of course the follow up from Insomniac that they have to stay quiet is a different matter. That's not being respectful of opinions, that's squashing them. But that works both ways. They also don't want their subsidiaries openly promote pro-life.

Anyway putting 1 and 1 together, it's clear now after the donation. Sony is pro-choice, doesn't want any of their subsidiaries to promote pro-life. They just don't have the balls to openly say it.

We interpret Sony's position differently.  I view Sony as saying "keep politics out of the work space."  Which is fair.  Politics shouldn't be in the work space.  Do you job and do whatever you want on your own time.  Fact is a large percent of the US population is Christian, and they don't agree with pro-choice, and that is their right, though I personally disagree.  There is nothing wrong with having a differing opinion but still being respectful.

Idk, Lol.

Maybe it's just a weird Jim thing, Jim was born in Britain right? Though he obviously lives in America now.

To me, it just looks inappropriate to talk about such a sensitive issue and then in the same post bang on about something completely unrelated and ultimately irrelevant in his personal life, it feels like an attempt to shove the issue to the side, he could have sent it in a separate email and that would have been better but at the same time I also think, why does he need to send his employees that email at all?

It's just odd, imagine your boss sending a company wide email about the cake he had for lunch, haha, it's just like, why? He can tell that stuff to employees he's friends with but I for one wouldn't give a crap about my bosses personal weekly life updates being emailed to me, post that crap on Linkedin or Twitter, Lol. Maybe if they were all friends with him but we're talking thousands of employees, unless he only sent the email to the bosses of the studios. 

I did find his obedient dog comment a bit odd too, I can be reading too much into it but I don't like the framing of telling your employees not to do something and then immediately talking about how you like dogs cause they're obedient, if say, CGI came into ModChat to tell us off and then immediately pivoted to "I like dogs, they're obedient" I would also find that pretty suspicious, Lol.

Imagine if Bungie was owned by a Russian company or Tencent or Netease they force the muzzle on Bungie and probably promote more Chinese hate to USA or what they did in Hong Kong? I think it was Hong Kong they banned players? or Was that Activision? The evil Saudi Prince will put the Muzzle too on american company since he killed an american reporter and didn't care .

I don't think that's what they're saying, it looks more to me that they only care about employees being public about it, it's unrealistic to think that Sony could stop all their thousands of employees from talking about it in the work space, I bet even today there's Sony employees talking about it at work. If it was only about that then they wouldn't have banned employees from simply tweeting about the Sony donation in their free time.

But once again, I also don't think we should always keep Politics out of the workspace when it affects the very employees in the workspace, the most important thing here, are the employees, they create the games that we love and banning abortion has much larger consequences on the employees than not banning abortion does.

Most polls I see in America are near 50/50 split on the issue but the worse that can happen to pro-life is they'd be upset for a little while, the worse that can happen to pro-choice is they're stuck with a baby for 9 months, the physical and emotional stress of that and what comes afterwards so it's clear which would hurt corporations more.

As I've said, I don't care if someone is pro-life but don't force it onto others, there's having an opinion but a lot of these "harmless opinions" are leading towards dangerous paths of taking away human rights.

Exactly. Here in Aus, companies don't want you making statements whilst representing them, which is fair enough as they pay your wage.  Hell in my role if someone from the media approaches you, you have to notify pubic relations and they will consider if you are allowed to speak lol. To me it isn't a big deal as some people are not capable of speaking and makes a company look bad.

Except for fact that we do not know what the situation is like within Sony and PlayStation.

These kind of political debates within can be be detrimental against the productivity within a company. For all we know there could be a number of employee's wasting time instead of doing their work and Jim sent out an internal email to his employee's not to post anything online on behalf of Sony. And the Sheier or whatever his name is kicking up a fuss - like his usual self. Its also most likely the higher ups at Sony telling Jim Ryan to deal with it, we have no clue.

In any case $50K is such a non-sum and is just to save face after kicking a hornets nest.