He did not advocate that one day, the oppressed would be on top and the "bad guys" would get theirs. That sort of attitude would be inimical to what he, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela would have advocated. Getting Brendan Eich fired makes nobody more free or less oppressed. Instead, it moves society towards a state where no one feels free to say what they really think, unless it hews to the majority opinion, and where might makes right and principles of tolerance and decency are only applied to the "correct" people. In days past, the "correct" people would have excluded non-whites and homosexuals.
An English vicar once said that to judge someone's character, observe not how they treat the people they need, but how they treat the people they don't need.
Would they have said we should not have spoken out when a company we know and would like to trust advances a man demonstrably and unrepentantly against equal rights for gay people to its highest post? Or would nonviolent activism and speech asking that such a person not be allowed to represent that company, and that someone with such views should not be honored but repudiated, be "inimical" to their philosophies?
I don't presume to know what King or Gandhi would have done. But I don't think speaking out against a public figure who stands against equal rights is wrong.
Sure, but going after someone for a political donation from 6 years ago after the issue has already been won seems vindictive and socially counterproductive. Can you point me to something that MLK, Mandela, or Gandhi did or said that would indicate they'd do something like that? I can point to many examples of words and actions of theirs that would suggest they'd advocate for a more magnanimous path.
Fifty years ago a similar uproar would have developed if a company hired a black CEO. The press release announcing his removal a week later would have been the same, some fluff words about being unable to effectively lead when he's spending all his time dealing with this.
People are comfortable with his firing because they feel his views are "wrong", but pretty much all progressive views, by definition, started out as "wrong" as well...
No one got fired here. Brendan Eich quit a job that, from all reports, he was dubious about taking from day one.
The typical angry Internet mob is, frankly, stupid, ill informed, incapable of clear thought, not sophisticated enough to appreciate detail and nuance, and unable to comprehend that principles of justice and tolerance apply evenly to all. The typical angry Internet mob has most of the disgusting qualities of the people who bullied me in school. It's just that now, they label themselves as "geeks" and "nerds."
The Japanese have a saying that it's only through suffering that one truly comes to understand kindness. Many geeks and nerds used to value principles and a sense of scientific/technical rigor and honor, which they deeply understood because they knew firsthand what it means to be subject to the power of groups lacking such principles.
There's a famous Feynmann story about how he discovered that Brazilian science students were able to recite the book-knowledge about the polarization of light but were unable to apply the basic physics to actual examples. The typical Bay Area 20-something Computer Science/Programmer geek will now stare at you blankly when you mention "frequency response." (or even prejudicially flip the idiot bit on you because you said something "audiophile" sounding) However, almost all of them will tell you enthusiastically about studying Fourier Transforms.
A more accurate description of this action would be as a boycott of a company with fair labor practices, for an exercise of free speech the CEO made 6 years ago. Does that even make sense? It sounds like a gratuitous witch-hunt to me.
If one's activism is going to further the notion of tolerance and social justice, then it had better hew to the principles of tolerance and social justice. Merely resembling other civil rights actions on the surface is just "Cargo Cult Activism."
And now I'm appalled by all these justifications while nobody seems to really discuss the huge technical loss. Maybe it's my engineering side speaking but I'm outraged to see such a great engineer forced to leave by people who in the end for the most part don't really care about Mozilla and will soon go to the next cause to defend. Meanwhile Mozilla has lost a bit of its soul and a part of its mind. The outcome is just sad.
Just who is being "defended" here? No free society should take offense to a nonviolent political stand, even unpopular ones. Going after someone like this is not defense. It's attack.
A much better attempt at the same basic argument (that it's a shame Eich was forced out) can be found here: https://medium.com/p/7645a4bf8a2
Given the tools at our disposal and the massive number of people from the tech community who blog, there's really no need to rely on Slate to tell us what to think here.
there's really no need to rely on Slate to tell us what to think here.
It's OK, good even, to stick your ear outside the tech bubble. But you shouldn't let anyone - in or out - tell you what to think. Everyone has ideas, synthesize them with a heavy scoop of context. You should be as skeptical of tech-bubble sources as you are mainstream ones, just in some different ways for different reasons.
Most (or perhaps all) of the Mozillians who tweeted this were employed by the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation which means that they report to the executive director of the foundation and not to the CEO. As foundation employees, they did not share the same org chart as Brendan.
I didn't realize the foundation had so many employees.
> Executive Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation (Mitchell Baker)
> Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation (Mark Surman)
> CEO Mozilla Corporation (New position, 2008)
Mark Surman's employees using @mozilla handles were calling for the resignation of a competing CEO?
Am i reading this right? In other words this was under political air-cover.
The Mozilla Foundation now focuses solely on governance and policy issues...
The corporate governance here actually seems like a problem.
The new CEO and the New COO of @mozilla are going to look at this with ???
Uh, pretty sure social conservatives far and wide are still wholly in favor of discriminating against homosexuals. We're decades early on this being a case of the persecuted becoming the persecutors.
I see no way to resolve this paradox from within the context of progressive ideology, but it's trivial to explain once you view it from the outside. As the example of cousin marriage shows, the behavior of Eich's purgers is not consistent with mere "civil rights" and "marriage equality", but it is consistent with signaling tribal membership, seizing political power, and smashing their enemies.
As it happens, right now gay marriage is an effective club with which progressives can beat conservatives. At some point, this may also be the case for cousin marriage—I can easily imagine opponents of cousin marriage someday being branded "Islamophobes", just as today opponents of gay marriage are branded "homophobes". But I predict that this will happen if, and only if, it serves progressive political ends.
[1]: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Cousin_Marriage_in_Islam
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Unit...
What "ouster"?
> It can't be as simple as "civil rights" and "marriage equality"
Even ignoring the questionable use of "ouster", yes, it can.
> for example, (first) cousin marriage is important to many groups [...]. And yet, I rarely see advocates of "marriage equality" get all lathered up over this issue.
So, what? Opponents of interracial marriage bans in the 1950s-1960s didn't get "lathered up" over cousin marriage bans, or same sex marriage bans, either. That doesn't mean that opposition to interracial marriage bans wasn't all about civil rights and equality.
> Are advocates of "marriage equality" in favor of legalizing cousin marriage?
Some probably are, some probably are not. As with most political issues, position on this issue doesn't absolutely determine position on any other issue.
> If not, why not?
Conceptually, regulating new legal family relationships on the basis of existing family relationships is different than doing so based on some other non-family status, so there is no real reason why positions on these should be expected to correlate.
> If so, why have they not worked harder to achieve it?
This is the "why aren't advocates of 'X' spending equal effort on every other analogous issue" argument, which ignores that actually effecting change often requires serial focus, rather than parallel effort.
> I see no way to resolve this paradox from within the context of progressive ideology
And yet, as noted above, I see several that fit quite well in that framework. Maybe what you fail to see says more about what you want to see than about what actually is there?
This rationalization of anti–cousin marriage bigotry makes you sound like an Islamophobe who cares little about violating Muslims' religious liberties by denying them their basic civil rights. Be careful not to get purged.
Just call it "fighting for same-sex marriage", because that's what it's mostly about. "Marriage equality" feels like trying to sway the listener by giving a deceptively broad impression of the aims of the movement.
Are there any injustices you see in the world that aren't also the popular opinion in your peer group?
Is there anything Mozilla or Eich can do to clarify things? But I don't know if that matters any more, now that American political commentators have tasted blood.
When we talk about "intolerance of intolerance" being OK, we're being a bit flip. What is actually meant by the phrase is that it's OK to make people act tolerant, even if they aren't naturally inclined to do so, in order to preserve a particular group's rights. They can hold whatever opinions they want, but they have to be civil. But Eich was already doing that. He was even one of the people who helped draft Mozilla's inclusiveness guidelines. This was just punishment because Eich held a particular opinion, not because he was actually having trouble tolerating gays in the organization.
It's very dangerous ground to label political donation as "intolerance." It's inimical to civic and democratic political processes in a free society. In fact, I would label it as intolerant.
If a person is taking actions that are nonviolent and legal, and they do not advocate the active destruction of our system of self governance, they should be allowed to coexist. This is what tolerance means. We need to let people oppose us and take positions we don't like. That is what it means to live in a free and democratic society. So long as those people don't act like sore losers, they get to take part.
While it was done legally, the actions that got Brendan Eich fired for a donation he made six years ago strike me as the actions of "sore winners." Brendan Eich's behavior, while a PR disaster at the end, consisted of running a company with policies friendly to homosexual relationships.
Mr. Eich was the one behaving magnanimously in this situation.
Indeed; if one were of a more conspiratorial bent, they might be inclined to think that's the exact purpose of this whole farce.
What if your reason is that he supports the elimination of benefits for a commonly discriminated against minority class, and he's being put into a position to at least indirectly make decisions about those benefits at a company that has historically supported them?
Any way to figure out an analogy to that in discrimination against gays?
edit: That's a serious question, and if you have a serious opinion, I'd think you'd reply after downvoting.
What the record actually shows is that the policies of Mozilla, in the time he was CEO, treated well those who had cause to oppose him in his private political life.
You mean during that week that everybody hammered him about his anti-gay donations and then he quit? I have doubts about his ability to push substantial policy during that period, to say the least.
The general wave of anti-gay equality campaigns didn't start or stop with prop 8. It began as a reaction to some of the early victories of the pro-equality movement. My own state tried to make it legal for businesses to deny service to me just a few weeks ago. His donation exists in a context where people are still suffering from the constant assault on their status as equal citizens.
He wrote an entire article equivocating them, then he quickly writes a couple sentences pointing out he full well knows it is absolute nonsense. Well played by him, I read the article.
It's not the reasoning I care about. It's never been about the reasoning. No one ever bought any bullshit about "community standards" even when it was being used to oust gays. It was about the act of marginalizing individuals over something that literally affects nobody else.
If a gay person works at my company, his being gay will have no affect on my livelihood. People with an anti-gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent. They're entitled to no consideration, because it's their choice to ostracize themselves for their ignorance. It should be seen the same as firing someone who habitually shits on the bathroom floor.
See how this goes both ways?
In the end, it's all just "You hold the opposite opinion from me about what's good for society, so I'm going to try to evict you from society."
Doing shitty things that undermine the lives of others is objectively evil.
Actively contributing to a campaign to crush individual rights is a pretty strong indicator that as a CEO he'd have trouble living up to all sorts of equal-opportunity employers requirements.
Yeah, it sucks that this was dragged into the public, and don't even get be started on the waste-land of cable news. But he probably should have thought of the employment implications in donating to a campaign against gays before he did it.
I like the bathroom floor analogy, because there's a tacit social contract that we don't shit on the floor. Same is true in business. He's free to say whatever he wants in public, but he's also free to be heavily encouraged to resign over whatever is he DOES say.
The actual policies of the organization he helped to run would suggest exactly the opposite.
