The lesson Mozilla learned here is that the angry Internet mob can get whatever it wants. It doesn't really matter which side of history the mob is on. The lesson that other boards learned with this is not 'hire socially-conscious people', but 'keep your head down and maintain the status quo'. Fifty years ago a similar uproar would have developed if a company hired a black CEO. The press release announcing his remova…
Indeed. I don't agree with Eich's personal views on gay marriage, but I'm kind of disappointed that everybody seems to be cool with getting people fired because they stood up for their personal views. 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...
The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
101–105 of 105 posts
Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how?
Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how? Is your immediate reaction to someone talking about a general principle to always assume it's cryptic opposition to your particular political views?
Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how? Is your immediate reaction to someone talking about a general principle to always assume it's cryptic opposition to your particular political views?
No, I asked that question because of what he wrote, "People with a gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent."
Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Political positions involve decisions about how we use violence to structure society. More germane to democratic industrialized 1st world nations, is how people choose to refrain from violence to structure society. Someone who donated in support of a proposition to kill all the Jews is probably rightly labelled antisemitic, even if they are always polite face-to-face. And yes, surely, such a proposition wouldn't be c…
First, there is no straw man here. A straw man is a misrepresentation of your position, which I then argue against. What I was constructing was a counterexample that fit what you'd laid out but that I assumed (correctly) that you did not agree with. It's a proof by counterexample of the completeness of your framework. Second, you deny that there is anything incomplete about your framework, and then you pull in hate s…
You proposed a fictitious law endorsing hate speech -- in other words an illegal law. Straw man.
First, it should be clearly noted that no one is calling for criminal penalties.
So the social penalties against gay men were perfectly okay?
Third, in a free society, you deal with the consequences of your actions
This is an appeal to a minimal standard of behavior. You are free to be a jerk to people you don't like. That's not a wise, compassionate, or great way to be.
Finally, again, there was no straw-man, and granting that introducing the notion of hate speech solves the issue
Oh brother. You concoct a straw-man law as part of your argument, then grant it as part of my argument? You have a habit of misplacing referents when it is convenient for you, with the effect of placing fictitious positions into other's mouths. You have done this in this thread and others. I leave it as an exercise for you to find and correct your mistake.
therefore they don't like me as much, therefore they prefer to do business with someone else
When people go digging up stuff from six years ago and use it as the basis of a mass action for an issue that they have won, it crosses a line.
So, your position is basically that all supporters of anti gay marriage political positions must be as socially stigmatized "as bad as racists," and that your job as a social activist isn't done until that's the norm. I'm sorry but that defies logic and is simply vindictive. We need not adhere to arbitrary, vindictive, and oversimplified social patterns of the past. (Isn't that part of the point of marriage between whoever wants to marry?) We will be further along in our journey as a pluralistic society when a gay marriage is no big deal at all, just like being in an inter-racial relationship is no big deal in the more cosmopolitan parts of our country. Your activism will be done not when your former opponents are sufficiently shamed and vilified, but when young people find your current attitude and those of Brendan Eich to be the quaint and incomprehensible stories of a past era.
Plenty of "perfectly legal" crappiness got done, and in some places still gets done to people with the "wrong" apparent sexual orientation and outward appearance. Doing more "perfectly legal" things that resemble a witch-hunt is only "an eye for an eye making the whole world blind."
Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I asked that question because of what he wrote, "People with a gay agenda have made a choice to stand in the way of progress. That means their actions negatively affect the people around them, malevolent."
That's interesting. Do you have a link/citation?