Comment by phaed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phaed | Hacker News Reader

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> Employee: When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief

> CEO: "When I talk about crossing the line from criticism to hate speech, I'm talking about when you start saying 'someone's kind doesn't belong here, and we'll all be happy when they're gone.'"

> CEO: So if and when we identify who this person is, if they are an employee, they will be fired. And regardless, either way, they are not welcome to continue to participate in the Mozilla project. It is not who we are.

Notice how he says when someone says "someone's kind doesn't belong here, and we'll all be happy when they're gone." is hate speech. Yet in the next sentence he says the very thing about the anonymous employee's kind. The only difference here is that she is a radical feminist, and the employee simply expressed his relief at her kind leaving, as she was a permanently offended well known bully of a supervisor and a source of stress for everyone under her.

It is funny how people are not allowed to openly have a negative opinion of another person if they are a "protected" class or just not a white male. When you stand up for the bully simply because they are feminist, you know something is wrong.

Either way this all left a bad taste in my mouth. I won't be supporting this organization any longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If you're tolerant of everything, including intolerance, you end up supporting intolerance.

Or, in short, it's perfectly fine to kick people out for being hateful. There's no inconsistency or hypocrisy in that position.

People are getting hung up on pedantic definitions of "hate speech". If we say "hostile work environment" instead, then the anonymous poster's behavior clearly crosses the line.

The response is not unique to Mozilla. Big companies like Google have probably encountered similar situations. Mozilla is just more open about it.

<disclaimer>I'm a Mozilla employee, though I never worked directly with Christie</disclaimer>

I don't know where you got that "she was a well known bully of a supervisor and a source of stress for everyone under her" but that doesn't match anything I've heard about Christie. Look at this guy comment history on reddit ( https://www.reddit.com/user/aoiyama), and maybe you'll change your mind.

Can't you use the browser without supporting them? I don't like the hypocrisy either but I love the browser (mostly). I do wish the engineers got back into management positions instead of these clueless politicians.

You know, it was not that long ago that being a hacker was, itself, a political position: you had thoughts on the power structures of the world and its borders, about US arms-control laws and their relationship to strong cryptography, about whether computer code should be subject to copyright or patent protection, about the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, about voting technology and algorithms, about computer crime laws, etc.

Then, slowly, the hackers became engineers. The hackers' way of thinking, in many ways, became society's way of thinking, and it was easy enough not to express contrary political opinions. At which point it became easy not to express any at all.

I am an engineer, and what's a "manifesto"? Damn kids, dragging politics into our professional industry... they're all alike.

http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

The idea that politics isn't conducive to a productive environment isn't strange. "Keep politics at home" is a phrase I've heard all my life. And it's advice that has deescalated many situations and got many non-productive time wasters back on track. I've been in (middle)management before, so I'm not just blowing smoke.

The idea that politics isn't conducive to a productive environment isn't strange.

No, just reactionary and hypocritical. You can't avoid politics, it's present in any social setting, and in any decision you make that affects others, particularly large groups of people (such as - Mozilla users). By shutting out debate, all you're doing is enforcing the political status quo.

Yeah, it's not uncommon for people who hold currently-centrist views to discourage dissent, to prefer de-escalating people's opinions, and to regard threats to their power and way of life as non-productive. All of those are way easier than defending currently-centrist views straightforwardly.

I'm not talking about government here. Sure fight the status quo of the government. I'm not applying centrist politics. It's neutralist, without left, right or center entering the equation. I know this never works when you're in HR, but it's not theoretical.

Yes there are work environments that deserve abundant politics, rebellion & real resolutions. But most people aren't working in Vietnamese sweatshops or diamond mines in the C.A.R.

  “There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics.”

Politics - Achieving and exercising positions of governance for organized control over a community.

It may be in many places & affect many things but it does not encompass everything. Absolutists are always wrong eventually (no matter how satisfying the quote is).

And being in a management position at a company doesn't strike you as organized control of a community?

There's no point talking anymore given the fact they you two don't think apoliticism is even possible.

That's the narrow definition; I'm talking about the wider conception of politics.

Engineers don't necessarily share your political leanings.

I don't care about their political leaning. Politics doesn't belong in the work environment, especially for management. That includes every "political leaning". Not just the ones we don't like.

No, you do care about political leanings. There's always going to be office politics. What you perceive as "politics" is politics you dislike.

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