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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

#31

Post by stcredzero »

secstate wrote: post #19
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-…

Thanks for the well-positioned comment. I had half a mind to nod my head at this article, but you're so right. The problem with Eich's donation was that it made an otherwise-unnecessary personal opinion perfectly obvious. 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,…

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.

The actual policies of the organization he helped to run would suggest exactly the opposite.

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

#32

Post by chc »

aneisf wrote: post #9
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.

Intolerance of an intolerance is not equatable with the original intolerance.

This isn't intolerance of intolerance. It's punishment for a small donation six years ago. If Eich were running around being a dick to gay Mozilla employees, nobody would disagree with firing him. But he's not. People are attacking him for his political sympathies, not for being intolerant. (In fact, Eich's behavior at Mozilla was exemplary. I have never heard of any instances where he had trouble tolerating gays or liberals.)

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.

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

#33

Post by mkr-hn »

I really wish anyone at all would acknowledge that not everyone who had a problem with his donation wanted him out of a job. People are too eager to combine everyone into two faceless mobs when the arguments were far more nuanced than two mindless binaries.

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.

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

#34

Post by differentView »

news_to_me wrote: post #21
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 habit…

Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how?

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

#35

Post by lexcorvus »

I'm sure many supporters of Brendan Eich's ouster are completely sincere, but it's difficult to explain the intensity of their feelings on this issue. It can't be as simple as "civil rights" and "marriage equality"; for example, (first) cousin marriage is important to many groups—indeed, in Islam cousin marriage is not only allowed, it's often preferred [1]—but it is illegal in most states [2]. And yet, I rarely see advocates of "marriage equality" get all lathered up over this issue. Are advocates of "marriage equality" in favor of legalizing cousin marriage? If not, why not? If so, why have they not worked harder to achieve it?

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...

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

#36

Post by devindotcom »

stcredzero wrote: post #28
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.

Wait, why is it defense for him to speak in favor, and attack for others to speak against? Don't mass speech and boycotts constitute a "nonviolent political stand"?

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

#37

Post by devindotcom »

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…

I don't understand why the "angry internet mob" is any different from thousands of people boycotting a company for unfair labor practices, or doing a sit-in somewhere, or picketing? How is the internet mob different from these other forms of nonviolent political activism?

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

#38

Post by news_to_me »

differentView wrote: post #34
news_to_me wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 habit…

Do you believe gay people being allowed to marry negatively affect you? If so, how?

No, but neither can I see how Eich, in this particular context, was negatively affecting anyone at Mozilla. Folks were uncomfortable with a private choice he made, just like some people are uncomfortable that some gay people choose to get married.

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

#39

Post by danmaz74 »

pessimizer wrote: post #16
danmaz74 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that, now, it becomes more difficult to argue that people shouldn't be fired because of their opinions about sexual preferences.

Were people ever arguing that, or were they arguing that people shouldn't be fired because of their sexual preferences? Are racial minorities being fired because of their opinions about race?

Racial minorities being fired because of their opinion about race - ie, their opinion that they should have the same treatments are whites - was very common as far as I know. To make a different example, the new laws in Russia aren't against "being gay", they are against those who argue for the rights of gays.

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

#40

Post by mkr-hn »

devindotcom wrote: post #36
stcredzero wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, why is it defense for him to speak in favor, and attack for others to speak against? Don't mass speech and boycotts constitute a "nonviolent political stand"?

I think a lot of people got their first taste of politics through cable news and never learned the older, more useful vocabulary with words like "disagree" and "challenge."
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