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The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

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Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#21

Post by news_to_me »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #14

He's right. And so the fuck what? 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-…

"If an anti-gay person works at my company, his being anti-gay will have no affect on my livelihood. 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. 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?

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#22

Post by doe88 »

From the start I was unconfortable with the idea of firing or demoting someone who had worked 15+ years in an organization without any related issues raised before.

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.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#23

Post by Zigurd »

danmaz74 wrote: post #5

I think that this case is doing a lot of bad to the cause of gay rights, because it feeds intolerance and radicalization.

That would be true if gays were trying to make straight marriage illegal. However, in reality, there is no symmetry in this issue.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#24

Post by pessimizer »

stcredzero wrote: post #18
pessimizer wrote: post #13

Or at least the PR reasons ("do what the customers want") and the libertarian reasons ("private companies can make any decision that they want for any reason") for not wanting Eich for CEO are the old PR and libertarian reasons for firing gays. 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 indirec…

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? 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 poli…

>in the time he was CEO

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.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#25

Post by stcredzero »

People have forgotten the magnanimous spirit championed by Martin Luther King.

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.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#26

Post by chc »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #14

He's right. And so the fuck what? 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-…

That's the same thing they said about gays and miscegenators. They weren't opposed just because people were on their high horses — no, it was the damage that gays and miscegenators did to society that required us to run them out of society.

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."

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#28

Post by stcredzero »

doe88 wrote: post #22

From the start I was unconfortable with the idea of firing or demoting someone who had worked 15+ years in an organization without any related issues raised before. 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…

will soon go to the next cause to defend

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.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#29

Post by forgottenpass »

rjknight wrote: post #11

I think we should be very wary of mainstream media coverage (and yes, Slate is mainstream media here) of this issue, because writers like William Saletan know relatively little about the specifics of Mozilla, technology or the personalities involved. This article ignores the specifics of the case and places it entirely within existing "culture war" political narratives. It's designed to present the story to people wi…

Each situation is unique, but leaning too hard on that fact starts to resemble "It's different when I [Mozilla] do it."

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.

Re: The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays

#30

Post by ryandvm »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #12

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...

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