I think an important distinction here is that as CTO he could certainly hold whatever political opinions he wanted and he shouldn’t be fired or forced to resign based on those positions. But the role of CEO is different; it is the top executive position of the corporation - the head of the corporate personhood, so to speak. As such he would be responsible for making a great number of decisions about internal policies, donations to politicians, which companies to do (or not to do) business with, etc. that makes his personal political positions a matter of public interest - or at least of interest to his customers. And if his customers don’t approve of those political beliefs, they have a right to not do business with him by not using his product. It’s that simple. At least to me it is.
Depends. Does that CEO fund groups who blow up abortion clinics?
A thousand dollar check is equivalent to an unrepentant NAMBLA supporter? Someone in this thread wrote about ‘shades of grey’, ‘Life isn’t just a 0 and 1’ and ‘getting outdoors more often’, you should read that. You might also want to read about how gay men were tarred with the NAMBLA brush and what it did for gay rights.
A thousand dollar check is equivalent to an unrepentant NAMBLA supporter?
That’s an obtuse distraction from my point. It’s not just “a thousand dollar check” as you’re trying to re-color and reframe it. It’s support for vicious, bigoted politicians and organizations that attack the civil rights of Americans.
Also, nowhere did I say they were equivalent. It was just an example of disagreeable people. Life has more shades of grey than that. Try better reading comprehension and less obtuse misrepresentations of my overall points next time.
Someone in this thread wrote about ‘shades of grey’, ‘Life isn’t just a 0 and 1’ and ‘getting outdoors more often’, you should read that.
You should try comprehending it.
You might also want to read about how gay men were tarred with the NAMBLA brush and what it did for gay rights.
That has absolutely nothing to do with my post.
Are you ever going to get to my actual points? You might want to tackle that before trying to somehow reframe this discussion about NAMBLA as an inane distraction from them.
I don’t know what you’re trying to insinuate by suggesting that I need to read about it, but if it’s to disparage me as anti-gay then it says much more about you than it does me.
The real tragedy, IMO, is that this guy’s life was turned upside down mostly because some crappy website (OKCupid) thought they could get some good PR out of it by raising it as an issue eariler this week. Hope they enjoyed all the press.
Or perhaps they were acting out of genuine moral integrity.
Sure, but that doesn’t fit with Ambiguity’s narrative where he’s got to attack the character of those who run OKCupid and the quality of their business because they dared to take a stand against bigotry and take a stand for civil rights.
I also find it telling that Ambiguity thinks the “real tragedy” is via the effect that free speech had on this bigot’s life instead of the effect this bigot had against civil rights by his disgusting support of anti-gay politicians and organizations.
Kind of shows the fucked up priorities right there.
He didn’t have a change of heart. He was directly contacted about it and only said he’s sorry if his donation hurt anyone. He could have easily refuted his position, but he did not. He also went on some odd tangent about Indonesians sharing his viewpoint. It seems clear that he still supports his previous decision.
Why are we responding to something clearly considered as hate with more hate?
Unlike the people that the CEO supported, the employees at Mozilla never expressed hate speech. They simply asked for him to step down. Comparing the two is false equivalency at its extreme.
I’m sorry but you seem to be working WAY too hard to put on a good PR face to seem credible; you actually seem to be creating more disbelief than creating belief in anything you say with each new statement.
Brendan’s post on his own blog seems bizarrely cryptic but certainly not the statement of someone voluntarily stepping down and doing the right thing for the team.
While I do find some credibility to the claim that Board members are leaving for other reasons, that just points to Mozilla’s PR being a complete mess and their succession plans a joke.
You claim it hasn’t been an issue, but I’ve seen this come up every few months since the word came out and I’ve seen Brendan questioned on it in Q&A sessions at least 2-3 times myself. Every time he’s been completely intransigent and tone deaf.
The immediate outcry from numerous Mozilla employees and, as mentioned above, this has been a controversy every few months for the last several years (people just have short attention spans) makes me think Mitchell and the rest of the Board are completely blind to the issue as well. (As soon as it was announced, I thought: “Uh Oh, Prop 8 is gonna come up again!” – Why didn’t the Board think that? Why was a third party spectator more aware of the potential backlash within a few seconds than the Board meeting for, hopefully, days to select an appropriate CEO?)
Why would the Board even think Brendan is appropriate for the role? He’s brilliant and passionate, but it would take about 15 minutes to learn he’s not CEO material. My thought is: no one wants it. Mozilla is dead.
I’m very much worried about the future of Mozilla… But, of course, I abandoned FF several years ago and already thought they were a dead end. Too bad. But let’s not whitewash it in the future and blame political correctness for Mozilla’s failure — it’s been a long time in the making.
But seriously, all the posts: not building confidence that Mozilla in any way has their crap together, actually tearing it down.
That’s Mitchell Baker speaking for Mozilla. Read Brendan’s own blog ( https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next-mission/ ) and he sounds intransigent as ever.
The real wrong IMO is people thinking that they shouldn’t use a browser is someone working on it – or even leading it – holds different opinions than they do.
It’s not about him holding a different opinion, it’s about him actively contributing to a cause that robs people of their human rights. I jumped on the “fuck you Eich, bye bye FF” bandwagon and I’m pleased that I did because now he’s gone.
Despite the claim that this came out of nowhere, it has been known for a while, has always been controversial, and at almost every opportunity for Q&A, someone from the LGBT community has asked him about it, given him a chance to change, or to even not change his view but to simply apologize for the hurt caused by his viewpoint. He has refused at every turn. It is safe to say that Brendan Eich still has the same views today.
Tell you what. If you find people opposes fuel efficiency regulations not because they don’t understand their relation to climate change, or think there are other factors that determine whether they’re a good idea, but because they truly want people to be unable to eat or lose their house?
Then sure, I will treat them the same disdain as people who support a cause because they truly want some people to be unable to marry. Otherwise, I’m saying the comparison is a cheap attempt to muddy the simple principle that this is not about a simple opinion, it is about an attempt to restrict others’ rights.
[quote=“bizmail_public, post:62, topic:27668”]About a third of the US thinks that applies to unborn children, as well.
So I assume that you will only endorse Pro-Life CEOs for Mozilla?[/quote]
But hey, I guess we there are even worse comparisons. You know, people who think a fetus has rights might recognize that doesn’t make abortion a simple question, because there is actually a woman involved too. That makes it a different and very off-topic matter.
Meanwhile gay marriage is balancing the rights of people to equal treatment with…the supposed rights of people to not treat them equally? See, what happened here is very simple:
- Eich donated money in an effort to seriously interfere with the lives of many people who haven’t done anything except belong to a minority.
- In response, various people have interrupted his career by announcing they didn’t want to support someone who wanted to harm others like that.
- Mozilla agreed that sort of attempted harm was contrary to their principles, and he stepped down accordingly.
The whole question revolves around an attempt to harm other people. If you’re comparing it to something that doesn’t involve someone a similar attempt to harm other people, your comparison is beside the point.
Come on. Mozilla isn’t losing the fight for the open internet today because Eich is not CEO. They’re losing it because Gecko turned to shit, WebKit became superior, and both Google and Apple have more resources. Mozilla’s last ditch plan to build a web-based mobile device OS is laughable. They’ll be gone in a few years no matter who is the CEO. If an open internet is a greater value to you than civil rights and you were counting on Mozilla to deliver it, you are going to be sadly disappointed.
The hallmark of a healthy civil society is how it treats those it disagrees with.
The “Tyranny of the Majority” is still a tyranny even when it agrees with your current moral outlook.
If OKCupid wanted to prove they were serious about all of this, they’d stop using JavaScript on their website.
Agreed! In a civil society you do not discriminate against people you personally disagree with, the way Eich tried to; and you do not support people who take disagreeable actions that try to harm other people, as people told Mozilla they will not.
Some people would like to pretend there is no difference between harm and disagreement, by equating similar form with similar content. They’re not. Refusing to support people who would oppose others’ rights is the opposite of tyranny of the majority.
That’s why they have votes, you know, so people with differing worldviews don’t have to resort to violence against one another.
Using free speech to ask that a bigot who is against civil rights step down isn’t violent by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, much of the hate speech that the CEO supported has caused quite a lot of violence.
he gave $1000 to support Prop8, waaaaay back in 2008
Yes, he supported a bigoted attack on the civil rights of Americans back in the “olden days” of 2008 while he was still at a young and impressionable 47 years old.
I haven’t seen anything FROM HIM claiming to still be for or against gay marriage.
If he’s for gay marriage and still supported Proposition 8 because he was too stupid to understand it, then he shouldn’t be CEO because of his pure ineptitude.
Did anyone ask him if he still holds those beliefs before they ran him out of his job?
Yes, and he offered an non-apology apology.
And, no one “ran him out of his job”. They exercised their free speech to request that a bigot who supported politicians and organizations that attack the civil rights of Americans to step down.
If we gang up on someone for what they used to believe, while not allowing some room for change and forgiveness
That room was given, and he chose not to take it.
You challenge anyone to find anything he’s done to act against anyone? Ok.
He donated money to a cause, whose sole purpose, was to put to a popular vote the right to equal access to government of an unpopular group. Ballot initiatives should not be used to decide the rights of people. The United States is a country under the rule of law, not the rule of the mob, armed with punch cards.
He had power, and a choice — and he chose to take away the rights of a group of people he considered to be second-class citizens and political scapegoats, who had no power over him, because he was scared of them.
He disenfranchised an entire group of people.
And it would have cost him nothing, it would have not harmed him in the least, to let them have the same rights as everyone else.
He participated in hijacking a secular government function - the ballot - to enforce his “religious” views on people he considered less-than-equals.
Brendan, with Prop 8, had power, and a choice. He had the power to limit people’s free and open access to government, or to promote it. Instead of promoting it, he chose to limit it. These are not the values of the Mozilla Foundation.
As CEO, he would have been tasked with making these kinds of choices. He would have been tasked with placing the values of an organisation ahead of his own. His choice with Prop 8, demonstrated that he’s comfortable with placing his own values before the greater good.
