Mozilla CEO resigned

boing
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I disagree. There are some things that FF is good for namely: not playing politics with plugins. Anyone can write an addon that can do anything - including breaking streaming to allow downloading of the source file. Google et al won’t allow it. You can obviously code hack your way to the file, but I’d rather a cute little button I can click and d/l any streaming file I please without having to dig through code.

This openness is and always has been FF’s biggest benefit. Plus Thunderbird is amazingly good compared to the alternatives.

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You didn’t actually ask a question, but man, is there a lot of condescension in this. Presenting treating the suppression of other people’s rights as “bad” as a “moral” stance, complete with scare quotes, as if it is something sensible people debate along with optimal tax rates and the existence of numbers over chablis.

I’m an adult but by no means old. I try to make up for my lack of experience by listening to other people. One who has been enlightening here is @Antinous, an excellent old mod from these boards who spoke a lot on this, and hopefully I have echoed some of his insight in these posts.

Because whatever inclinations I had in this direction, he made clear: people like me get to treat this as a moral question. We can debate the philosophy as long as we want; we can grow passionate in our defense of equality or show sympathy to its opponents at our leisure. We can work hard for one side or the other, and then we can stop when we’re tired. In short, we have the luxury of treating it as a sport.

But to LGBT people, this is all in earnest. They debate it knowing that the decisions revolve around them, whether others let them partake in what people like me enjoy by default. They don’t have the privilege of retiring when they get tired of having rocks thrown at them. They are stuck in the fight as long as it is brought to them, and it affects their lives in earnest.

We should at least try to remember that and not imagine this is all some academic argument or disagreement. Trying to harm people is bad, without any quotes; treating that the some people have here, as a matter of opinion or disagreement we need to be balanced on, is much less being open-minded than it is being callous toward the vulnerable people.

Eich is a human being with all the nuances that entails, all the good and bad aspects – and he had decided to use his influence to do real harm to other human beings. And in a way it’s been a sport for him too, because his rights have never been at stake. All he’s suffered is a metaphorical sports injury: he lost a job with an organization whose mission is contrary to what he was doing, because those who do care about other people said they didn’t want to support someone who would try to harm them.

All the comments here of people who have been displeased with this outcome have been trying to gloss over that. It’s all about how dangerous it is to try and enforce matters of opinion, and comparisons to different situations, and how we don’t want to be moral absolutists. Without any acknowledgement of this isn’t a question of his opinions; he was trying to hurt other people.

Tl dr, I think this is all summed up in the quote I started with, which I’m going to repeat because it’s one of my favorites:

Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest. – Plutarch

When you look at things like this please try to consider who has what at stake, who is playing and who is surviving. Because without that, talk of opinions and nuances and keeping an open-mind is just so much disdain for the ones getting pelted.

And with that wall of text, I think that is probably all I can say on the subject. Anyone who still thinks this is about punishing someone for having an unpopular opinion needs to grow a heart before I can talk to them anyway.

(puff puff puff)

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Keep in mind that you’re talking about people who firmly believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.

Some of these people honestly think that the only reason people want to get gay marriages is because they’re perverts, not unlike pedophiles or zoophiles, something to be suppressed, possibly punished.

And tbh, I sat down recently with some older gentlemen, silently listening with horror, one of them who had worked in the fields, and flat out bluntly said, “The thing that the treehuggers have gotta understand is that there ain’t gonna be no trees.” In a conversation discussing the environment vs. making a living.

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If you knew me, I’d like to think it’s obvious that I think gay rights are just as important to me as civil rights and women’s rights. That being said, this whole business makes me very, very sad. A bunch of people berated Brendan Eich into resigning. But you can’t fight intolerance with intolerance. Plenty of people supported proposition 8 (which was a horrendous proposition), does that mean that they all need to be scared?

You have to remember that if it weren’t for Brendan Eich, we’d all be using IE6 right now with blinky text on our website on pages whose source code we can’t see while people steal our credit card numbers from our computers. I exaggerate just a bit, but the internet would be a very different place if it weren’t for the work that he and Mozilla has done.

ps- It looks like Brendan Eich’s twitter account has been deleted.

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If it wasn’t for Brendan Eich, we wouldn’t have JavaScript.

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Probably safest to not use any software you didn’t write. It’s the only way to be sure it’s not contaminated by bad people.

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I’d like to think it’s obvious that I think gay rights are just as important to me as civil rights and women’s rights.

I’m not sure why you are separating them. They are all civil rights.

you can’t fight intolerance with intolerance.

Mozilla employees used their right to free speech (at the risk of their own jobs, safety, security, etc., mind you) to ask that a bigot who supports bigoted politicians and organizations who actively attack civil rights to step down.

What’s your plan to fight intolerance? Keep your mouth shut and wish it away? I’m glad Martin Luther King didn’t decide to keep his mouth shut because it made bigots uncomfortable and feel unwanted.

You have to remember that if it weren’t for Brendan Eich, we’d all be using IE6 right now with blinky text

Even if that was remotely true, (which it isn’t) what does that matter? Are you trying to tell us that we should let bigotry and attacks on civil rights slide because someone is a decent coder?

Should’ve good football players been allowed to get away with rape too? You know, so the NFL wouldn’t be a different place today?

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I don’t see how trying to punish people isn’t harm, but sure, we could suppose he’s convinced it’s a matter of protecting others as with pedophilia. So yes, I’d consider such a person as having better character than someone who simply wants to harm for its own sake, just a worthless understanding of their actions.

Now someone who has that little idea that they can’t even tell whether trying to abridge other people’s rights is doing harm or not – do I think they should be in charge of an organization about enriching a resource for everyone’s benefit? The answer to that doesn’t change so much.

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I am pretty sure that you actually can fight intolerance with intolerance. The reason why you can’t drop an N-bomb at work an expect to have a job these days isn’t because of love and harmony in humanity. It is because it is utterly socially unacceptable, and you can expect everyone around you to swiftly consider you a bigoted piece of shit. For every person who doesn’t brutalize another person out of love, there are two that don’t brutalize their fellow humans out of fear.

A large part of the gay rights movement was people simply standing up and decry other people as piece of shit bigots when they were homophobic. It was sons cutting off their mothers when their mothers refused to accept that they were gay. It was friends calling out friends and colleagues when they made homophobic remarks. Today, it is becoming more and more socially unacceptable to be a bigoted shit head. You can’t change everyone, but you certainly can make them feel like the shit heads that they are when they speak up.

You can see the entire shift in the debate. You used to be able to stand up and say some truly horrible things about gay folks in public. Now, even the bigots seeking to strip sexual minorities of basic human rights have to double back and try and rephrase their bigotry into euphemistic bullshit like, “I support traditional marriage” (which apparently doesn’t mean daughters are property to be sold off as soon as they start bleed). The retreat has been fantastic, and for every person that retreated because a friend of family member came out and they realize that gay folks are not going to eat them, another dozen retreated because they don’t want their friends and family to think that they are bigoted douchebags.

Free speech isn’t there to peacefully state your piece and be free to criticism. Free speech is there for ideas to battle it out in bloody combat.

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If it wasn’t for Brendan Eich, we wouldn’t have JavaScript.

I can respect his accomplishments. But, does that give him the free license to support the attacks of the civil rights of other Americans without any repercussions? Where does that line of flawed reasoning end?

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Poor bigots. It’s just not fair that there’s so much intolerance for their intolerance.

sammy-davis-archie-bunker-kiss-2.jpg709×480 64.9 KB

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I have to say, I always love the “you are being intolerant of my intolerance!” arguments. It is almost always the last argument after a full retreat. You can see the joy in their faces when they think they have found the liberal’s achilles heel. They always look so sad when you explain that you are also intolerant of murder, rape, slavery, and Nazis, and that you are pretty happy to be intolerant of assholes seeking to brutalize others.

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You didn’t really disagree with me about anything. You more or less said: all of that could be true but I like FF because I can download a streaming file. Sorry if you can’t figure out how to do that with other browsers and sorry if you think that “feature” will keep FF a thriving browser.

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If OKCupid wanted to prove they were serious about all of this, they’d stop using JavaScript on their website.

Yes, they should shut down their website, put all their employees out of work while they stop using some code he invented. Otherwise, we can’t take them seriously. I mean, the point wasn’t to draw attention to a bigot who supported an attack on Americans’ civil rights or anything. The point was to crush the usage of some code. Yep.

Actually, I’m having a hard time taking you seriously. You’re joking, right?

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Uhm, AFAIK, nobody that I know of who worked for the Mozilla corporation publicly asked him to step down (as in the people that actually worked for him). Some folks from the Foundation did, but he wasn’t their CEO. So they asked for a guy whom they didn’t even work for to step down. It struck me as a cowardly bit of grandstanding (and I’m saying it in public so I expect they’ll see it and these are people I know).

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I meant people who actually worked with him and knew him or interacted with him. Do you qualify?

While I find his giving money to that cause reprehensible, we live in a democracy and we are allowed to back whatever causes we wish and to get out the vote for them. Doesn’t mean he isn’t on the wrong side of history or that he doesn’t have opinions with which I very much disagree but also doesn’t mean he’s an evil bastard. Half of the state backed that proposition by voting for it (it passed the vote). I’m not ready for a political litmus test for everyone I work with.

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Uhm, AFAIK, nobody that I know of who worked for the Mozilla corporation publicly asked him to step down (as in the people that actually worked for him). Some folks from the Foundation did, but he wasn’t their CEO.

Whether they are employees directly under him or staff at the foundation is beside the point, in my opinion. It takes a certain amount of risk to publicly stand up to bigots. Bigots and those who support the views of bigots have a solid track record of using violence and destruction to get their “point of view” across when you disagree with them.

It struck me as a cowardly bit of grandstanding

What was cowardly about asking a bigot to step down, specifically?

(and I’m saying it in public so I expect they’ll see it and these are people I know).

For some reason I don’t think it’s quite as brave to stand up to people who are against bigots. But, if you think that’s brave or something, more power to you.

we live in a democracy and we are allowed to back whatever causes we wish

We’re also allowed free speech. The people that asked him to step down used their free speech rights to do it.

Just as it’s Brendan Eich’s prerogative and right to pump money into bigoted politicians and organizations that attack the civil rights of Americans, it’s also the prerogative for Americans to ask that he step down in order to resist these attacks on our civil rights.

They have every right to say that they don’t want to work with someone or be a part of an entity who attacks civil rights and they are exercising that right. If they were saying that they didn’t want to work with or be associated with someone who is an unremorseful NAMBLA donator, they’d have that right as well.

Just as the CEO of Chick-fil-A has a right to be a bigot, we have the right to call him out on it. I personally will no longer purchase products from Chick-fil-A and I’ll let anyone and everyone know why. I would also suggest that everyone should quit Chick-fil-A until he resigns, as is my right.

Those that say that they are fine with working with a homophobic bigot who attacks the civil rights of Americans as long as he does a good job are perfectly within their rights to say that unethical drivel. But, it’s also my right to think much less of you, question your overall ethics and have that affect any dealings I have with you in the future.

So, keep whining about the civil right of free speech that these people are exhibiting while giving a man who attacks civil rights a pass. It’s my right to lose respect for your ethical judgement and I sure as hell will never work with you, nor do anything to enable you in any way, as is my right.

doesn’t mean he’s an evil bastard.

I didn’t see those tweets from the staff (or whatever) calling him an evil bastard. I do believe they simply asked that he step down because they were uncomfortable working under (or with) a bigot at the helm of Mozilla.

If people don’t like the fact that a gay man is the CEO of Apple, they are perfectly free to ask Tim Cook to step down as well.

I’m not ready for a political litmus test for everyone I work with.

Nor is most anyone else. But, being someone who works with you in an office and being the public face of the corporation as CEO is two different things.

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It’s a cheap trick to demand someone else’s boss resign. If it was people who actually worked for his organization, then there might have been risk. The fact that they didn’t make this clear when doing it is why it is grandstanding. These folks got a lot of writeups without anyone realizing that they didn’t work for him (and the writeups implying they did).

The fact is that Mozilla is a remarkable open and embrasive organization. People speaking out against those in authority had lots of options within Mozilla without turning it into press fodder.

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It’s a cheap trick to demand someone else’s boss resign.

So, it’s only proper to ask that a bigot steps down if you directly work for the bigot? Should we apply that to other things as well? You know, only if you’re very directly affected by a wrongdoer should you step up for what is right?

Seems to me you have a bigger problem with Americans exercising their free speech rights than you do with someone who supports the destruction of civil rights.

I think your priorities are pretty screwed up there.

People speaking out against those in authority had lots of options within Mozilla without turning it into press fodder.

Like keeping their mouths shut as to not offend bigots or make bigots uncomfortable? Or just to protect your fragile sensibility of proper decorum?

The fact is that Mozilla is a remarkable open and embrasive organization.

Run by a bigot CEO. Not a good fit.

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I see the fun game you’re playing there but I’m not going to play. Enjoy your time playing with yourself, @Cowicide. I don’t forget the history we have.

Let me know when you’re interested in actual discussion versus simply creating a straw man by putting words in my mouth in order to have something to play with.

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