[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922
I downvoted you because that smug sarcastic smiley really set my teeth on edge.
Mozilla's done a few other things that I mildly dislike, and they tend to clump together in my mind. Nothing that's a big deal, but enough that I usually keep a copy of Pale Moon on the machines I use most often.
Any web page can listen to your microphone if you allow it to, and the code for it can be downloaded without your consent, even if you have JavaScript disabled, if it's embedded in the HTML code.
how so?
This part is inaccurate. See: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922...
> You don't have to take my word for it. Starting and stopping the hotword module is controlled by some open source code in Chromium itself [3], so while you cannot see the code inside the module, you can trust that it is not actually going to run unless you opt in.
Also:
> I hope this explanation is satisfactory. I am closing this as WontFix because it is already an opt-in feature, and Debian has already removed the component in their distribution of Chromium [2].
I've read the comments on that bug thread and I really struggle to see anything sinister that doesn't require several visits to the tinfoil haberdashery. There are problems around governance, communication and lack of respect for the priorities of the OSS community - but to see this as a failed attempt to listen to the conversations of Chromium users without their consent strikes me as verging on conspiracy thinking.
> First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt in to hotwording. If you go into "chrome://settings", you will see a checkbox "Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search". This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it, the hotword module will not be started.
Meanwhile, Google doesn't return results for guns in the shopping section. So I get to search a bunch of sites and call people like i'm on astalavista in 1998.
Sad Truth: both companies inject a brand of exclusionary (read: discriminatory) politics into their products. I don't trust either.
He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views.
I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those views. What would that world look like?
It's called not talking politics or religion at work. Or not discriminating against someone because of something unrelated to their job. There is zero conflict of interest between Eich supporting prop 8 and heading the Mozilla foundation. Same as there is zero conflict of interest for Palmer Luckey supporting the leading candidate in the presidential election.
Those people both exercised their freedom of speech (via donations).
Freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of such speech.
Cheers, Of course not.
>Freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of such speech.
Fair point. Riddle me this:
Should we force a baptist cake company to bake a cake for a gay wedding, force a Jewish bakery to bake a swastika cake, and force a Nazi bakery to bake a Jewish cake?
If not one. Why should we force one and not the others?
If you think the government should force nothing on any baker I agree with you.
>Those people both exercised their freedom of speech (via donations).
Which people? As far as I know there wasn't any actual fallout beyond saber rattling.
Reich and the guy from oculus who supported the trump group.
> Riddle me this
What is a "cake for a gay wedding" compared to any other kind of wedding cake? Is there same-sex marzipan I'm not aware of?
A baker refusing to bake a cake for someone because they're gay/Jewish is discrimination, and bigotry/racism (religious discrimination if you consider Judaism purely a religion and not an ethnicity/race)
Refusing to bake a cake for neonazis would also be discrimination. Refusing to bake a cake of a swastika isn't exactly the same thing - a swastika is imagery associated with one of the greatest war crimes of recorded history.
Also, you're in the wrong direction anyway. A business refusing service isn't the same as a consumer refusing to use a business.
I'm trying to establish an objective rule for what kinds of discrimination you believe should be legal. You described each situation but you didn't actually make a value judgement (which was the whole point of the question).
I'm not so sure. Maybe they were brought up that way. You can't choose your parents or your religion in that respect. Muslims have a choice to be Muslim or not, should it be OK to discriminate against them too?
That said, we still need to draw the line somewhere if we want our laws to be effective. And the universally intuitive place to draw it is between biology and environment. The result is that environmentally unlucky individuals will get screwed so the rest of society can flourish. So yeah, if you had racist parents who brainwashed you with neo-nazi doctrine, I'm fully okay with the government not requiring that you be accepted by society.
Religions are a touchy subject for many, but I don't personally believe they should enjoy any special protections. And I say that as an atheist who'd be highly discriminated against by many, many people.
A company refusing to produce a specific item for a person because they feel it is inappropriate is not discrimination unless they're providing the same thing to other people.
A person refusing to support a company because of the actions of its staff/owners/etc is not discrimination.
You should care if your coworker is neo-nazi or if he is supporting Islamic State or Westboro Baptist Church.
The only diagreement is whether Eich was closer to the former or the latter. I can perfectly imagine people whose rights he wanted to take away to think he's the latter.
The only thing that an individual should be judged on at work is actions/comments/etc. made at work.
If you'd like to argue otherwise I'd hope you at least have something more formally define-able than 'he was trending towards being a neo-nazi'. I'd also expect you to be able to point to an authority for defining these ideological limits other than the currently loosely defined group-think.
Please answer these few scenarios:
-Should someone believing and actively promoting pro-life stances(outside of work) be fired?
-Should a casual narcotics user on weekends be fired once it's found out he/she uses?
-Should someone be fired for having a confederate flag hanging in their living room? What if they're black?
They also scream white power around the campfire when drunk though so perhaps not typical.
I can perfectly imagine any number of anti-democratic, politically obsessive people who would think that way, yes. They are certainly welcome to hold that view, but if the rest of us want to maintain a cordial and pluralistic society instead of one of constant political warfare and discrimination, we need to oppose those people at every turn.
"Never" is a strawman, but I imagine that would be a world where academia doesn't feel a need to protect its students from ideas, and where people of different viewpoints can work alongside each other instead of shaming groupthink into existence.
AKA the ends justify the means.
In the end, I don't think one's views outside of the workplace should necessarily relate to their work performance. Eich was close to a public figure, that doesn't make the witch-hunt any better.
If I had a coworker who habitually made racist statements, for example, and I liked my job, I'd want them to lose their job. That kind of work environment would be quite unpleasant for me and probably a lot of other people.
To generalize, I have no problem saying I want to live in a world where employers feel comfortable firing racists who openly air those kind of distasteful remarks. (I didn't say, "I think all racists should be unemployed," mind you.)
What constitutes "controversial enough to merit consequences" and what those consequences would be (i.e. the world as we now have it), that, I think, there'll never be a single set of rules. It'll always be up to contemporary society, the employer, etc.
The equivalent situation in your case is having your views on welfare known and your employees (and anybody else transacting with your company) deciding whether or not they want to associate with you. Others' views on welfare would not be a valid reason to fire or refuse to hire them.
That is a very convenient interpretation of how things went down. They forced him to resign.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=smsm42
said it best:
>... a group of political activists put pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich because of his political views, for political reasons, and Mozilla as organization caved. There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his job, and no single instance or evidence of any problem with his job. It was a political decision that being friends with political activists is better than keeping Eich.
>The equivalent situation in your case is having your views on welfare known and your employees (and anybody else transacting with your company) deciding whether or not they want to associate with you. Others' views on welfare would not be a valid reason to fire or refuse to hire them.
It certainly would be a valid reason to not hire them if I had to fear them ousting me from my company for holding opinions unpalatable to them.
This is a very disingenuous way of describing it. More proper way to describe it would be that a group of political activists put pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich because of his political views, for political reasons, and Mozilla as organization caved. There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his job, and no single instance or evidence of any problem with his job. It was a political decision that being friends with political activists is better than keeping Eich.
For me, that ruins the trust in the organization. If they are ready to sacrifice their own top management, would they really stand up for me as a user if that would cost them anything? I don't think so.
> He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views.
And now Mozilla has to accept consequences of being the organization which will fire you because you hold unpopular political views. As a person who holds plenty of unpopular views (different from Eich's but still largely unpopular) I want to do as little as possible with such organization.
I don't know if that's true. I don't know how many gay folks work for Mozilla, but I'm 100% it's a non-zero number. They might have had a real problem with his donating to Prop 8. I couldn't say whether they did, being neither gay nor a mozilla employee, but I could imagine it might make them uncomfortable, just from the conversations I had with my gay friends when gay marriage was becoming a thing. Given that, I kinda think your confidence that there was "no single instance" of a problem is probably misplaced.
"Mozilla has to accept consequences of being the organization which will fire you because you hold unpopular political views."
Mozilla didn't fire him. He resigned of his own volition, as I and many others have pointed out. You're free to want as little to do as possible with that organization, or with any organization, but usually when I boycott something it's for real stuff, not stuff I just made up in my head. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Yeah, I'm sure he just up and decided to resign with zero pressure from political insiders and the flash mob causing outrage. That's probably what happened.
He held an unpopular view, acted on it, and people weren't happy with him. Far better to step down and let the organization right itself, than to try and hold onto his position and his retrograde views simultaneously. Shows real class.
Isn't this the plot to every dystopian story ever told ("conform, or else")?
As a lefty, I understand the motivation, but disagree with it- it will never work; you will never change a persons values (positive or negative) via public shaming, all you will do is force the 'undesirable attitudes' underground. As a member of a 'disadvantaged minority', I'd rather have bigotry out in the open and act accordingly. If Trump has as a silver lining, it is dragging all the latent bigotry into the light.
edit: I always like to compare Mozilla to Dropbox. In the immediate aftermath of Eich being forced out, the same boycott mob tried to pressure Dropbox into removing Condoleezza Rice from its board for being a 'war criminal'. In contrast, Dropbox's board didn't blink- they called the bluff and showed unequivocal support for Ms. Rice with a firm "No" and that was the end of it.
I think humans are meta and that when censorship occurs like this it only empowers the people it's trying to silence. Meaning that while Brandon Eich may personally have had negative impact, I honestly don't think in terms of public opinion that this incident had a positive impact on gay rights. Instead, it's cited as an example of how the 'regressive left' is silencing conservative views, it strengthens their resolve.
I think a large part of it is due to the internet. Meaning, in the past this likely wouldn't have been seen by nearly as many people, and they wouldn't have the ability or impetus to truly impact the individual.
Given the relative ease of denigrating him, plus acting from a place of moral authority(depending on your views...) this is the result. And the 'justice' felt good too, because it was 'right'.
I think about this a _lot_. I can feel the racial tensions even in my neighborhood, it's never felt this fractious before and I honestly believe the perceived(and in many cases very real) levels of censorship are a major contributing factor.
Racism/Sexism/Homophobia - I firmly believe that the majority of individuals can see the immoral and in many cases plain stupid aspects of these. I also firmly believe that a part of developing a healthy moral framework involves 'testing/bouncing off' offensive beliefs between one another so that we can rationalize and come to the conclusions ourselves, not being able to freely 'play' stifles growth.
All the silence does is make people want to go home and release their angst online, we end up with extremely polarized communities where these specific local instances of injustice from both sides are used to justify/re-enforce a narrative. The end result(or perhaps the ongoing/developing and hopefully not escalating) is things like actual white supremacists on /pol/ and #KillAllWhites etc. on Twitter.
I have so much more I could say about this really.
Social pressure (conform or face consequences) is one of the basic parts of the human experience, so this is unsurprising.
I too like how Trump is pulling a lot of hidden bigotry back out into the open; it gives me a chance to talk with my well-meaning but ignorant lefty friends about how racism really is still prevalent, and a problem.
But it isn't enough just to show it's there, the point is to top up our sense that those attitudes are unacceptable and don't belong in civil society, and that we all still need to keep working on getting those ideas out of the discourse, and so on.
But getting bigoted ideas out of civil society? Well, we're back to social pressure ("conform to my vision of the world where bigotry is no longer a thing").
If, by the way, you think bigoted ideas do belong in civil society, then we probably won't get any further than that.
You might as well commend Soviet dissidents for "putting on their big boy pants and owning the consequences of their actions" when the KGB marched them off to the Gulag. The fact that someone bows to bullying pressure doesn't make the bullying pressure OK.
The end results are the same but the mechanism isn't. Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe. But they didn't. That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash.
No it wasn't "personal issue". There was no personal issues with Eich, no evidence of anybody having personal beef with him - either because of sexual orientation issues or any other - was ever documented. It was a purely political issue, namely - political pressure to punish Eich for holding a particular viewpoint, completely unrelated to his job performance.
> Comparing it into company-wide discrimination is not helpful.
There was neither wide nor narrow discrimination. There wasn't any. Discrimination was not the issue. Thoughtcrime on Eich's part was.
> can't work with this guy because we don't agree with him
If you can't work with people that disagree with you, you should work as a lighthouse watcher, ranger in a remote mountainous region, hermit or another profession that puts you out of contact with people. People should not have to lose jobs because you disagree with them.
> Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe.
Nobody asked his colleagues to be "accommodating" to anything. The only thing was to have minimum decency to not throw out a person because he committed a thoughtcrime. That proved to high a bar for Mozilla. Thus they organization will now have to live with infamy of what they did. It takes years to build trust, it takes one case like this to destroy it.
> That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash.
There was no "clash". Eich did not "clash" with anybody. There was a campaign of personal destruction, which run him out of the job, and which in eyes of many - including me - branded Mozilla as organization which is cowardly, disloyal to their loyal workers, and easily manipulated by hate mobs.
Nobody likes being uncomfortable, perhaps having gay employees made Eich uncomfortable too. But I don't remember hearing about him forcing anyone out of the company or discriminating against anyone under any circumstance.
To prevent his employees from feeling uncomfortable should the government allow Eich to stop hiring gay employees?
Oh god, don't give the US Supreme Court any ideas >_>
They already think corporations are people with religious rights, and that discrimination is a thing of the past. This wouldn't be much of a stretch for them at this point.
( You can already refuse to hire gay people (as well as outright fire them) in most states; but Mozilla is headquartered in a state where you can't. If anyone is interested, here is the map: https://mic.com/articles/121496/one-map-shows-where-you-can-... )
No they don't. They think people, when organizing into corporations, do not lose their rights just because they did something together.
Example: you have freedom of speech, and US Constitution and US laws recognize that.
You can print a newspaper and freedom of speech protects you. Now, printing a newspaper is hard. So you ask a bunch of people to help you, and you call these people together "The New York Times Corporation". Is printing the newspaper together still covered as your free speech?
The US Supreme Court thinks yes, it is. I think they are completely correct. To think otherwise would be to say people have free speech right, but only to the point where it actually matters - where they can speak so powerfully and loudly that the government and other people in power have to listen.
In our modern world it is virtually impossible to achieve it without organizing - and so by pretending that after organizing people lose their rights that they had before would be to rob the First Amendment of its meaning and turn it into a sham, when you can only speak freely when it does not matter.
Does that mean CEOs/management should be forced to resign for donating to the Trump campaign if some of their employees are Mexican immigrants or Muslim?
Eich resigned voluntarily, according to Eich and the Mozilla board (i.e. every involved party). No one forced him.
I started an internship at Mozilla right when Eich got fired, and the vast majority of people I talked had the same reaction: "Yeah, his donation isn't bad in itself, but the way he dealt with this polemic shows he's a bad as a CEO" (which does not convince me at all... since, you know, nobody is ready to deal with that type of pressure from the media, unless you're a politician with a PR team).
Bottom-line: As a CTO, he had a lot of engineers reporting to him, many of which were LGBTQ, and Mozilla is known for being one of the most pro-LGBTQ companies out there. He would have most likely been a great CEO to Mozilla, and a donation done personally cannot possibly be a valid reason for asking him to resign (the media, a tiny minority of people at Mozilla).
Based on that premise, sure.
From my personal experience talking to actual mozilla employees and reading blog posts by mozilla employees, that statement looks pretty true. Even LGBT employees supported him through the ordeal. Yes mozilla the company had some problems with it's policies, but from what I've heard directly from insiders, Eich was partnering with the LGBT people to solve their problems and never acted in and discriminatory manner against them. Loosing him hurt their cause and the company.
Please do some research on what actually happened instead of blindly jumping on the popular bandwagon.
Of course there were employees who were unhappy when they learned about his donation. In fact they were quite surprised because of how professionally he did his job.
But I have never heard of any thing he's ever done to act in a discriminatory manner on the job. I have heard of cases where he actually protected such people and helped improve things internally.
So what? I might have a problem with my boss' watch or suit or the shows he likes or the newspapers she reads. Who cares? I'm not marrying him/her, I'm working with him/her. It's irrelevant for the work.
There's no single piece of evidence Eich did in any way impede, discriminate against, was hostile to or in any other way hurt any gay - or straight, for that matter - employee, while working for Mozilla. If there were a shred of evidence, it would be unearthed and paraded by now. It wasn't. Conclusion is it doesn't exist. That's what I am talking about "no single instance". I don't claim nobody ever disagreed with him on anything, because a) that's impossible and b) nobody cares, disagreement is completely normal.
> but I could imagine it might make them uncomfortable,
The idea that everybody should behave in a way that makes absolutely everybody else comfortable and never do anything that could cause slightest discomfort to anybody is one of the most stupid ideas that ever come out of American college campuses. Fortunately, even its proponents don't actually believe in it - they are completely fine causing their opponents maximum discomfort. It's only their own comfort that they aim to protect. Which is fine - but I see no reason why their comfort is more important than everybody else.
Of course, some people - including ones working for Mozilla - may hate Eich's views. So what? If you have views, somebody would eventually hate them. And some would love them. And most wouldn't care.
> Mozilla didn't fire him
Technically, no. Effectively, yes. There are more ways to fire a person than yell "You're FIRED!!!!" to his face. This "his own volition" is a pile of bull, just like saying "oh, your honor, this guy handed his wallet to me on his own volition, and the gun in my hand has really nothing to do with the case, let's forget about it. The guy even said "please take my wallet and let me go!" which I obliged to do. So I don't see what all the fuss is about, it's clearly a voluntary transaction."
> but usually when I boycott something it's for real stuff, not stuff I just made up in my head.
I remain grateful to you for this short, but instructive story about your life. It was very educational, truly a people interest story.
As I said elsewhere, if you can't get yourself out of a situation like that, you probably don't have the chops to be CEO of the organisation anyway.
You could justify any discrimination with "he quit, that was his choice". Today the discrimination is against someone who held a political opinion some day in his past. Or should I say "in his/her/its/Apachehelicopter" past as to not assume their gender and not condemn my future ability to be CEO?
Being discreminated against for being a supporter of discrimination is not "wrong", same as it isn't ethically wrong to give the death penalty to murderers. The argument against the death penalty is we make too many mistakes, not that it's somehow wrong to sentence people to the death when they are responsible for murder.
The crime begets the punishment. Women have committed no crime, but Eich was clearly guilty.
So when does reparations end? Is there some objective condition that can be met where we can all agree to stop trying to prop certain groups up while discouraging others?
I personally don't think that's possible. We would spend the rest of time trying to correct perceived wrongs done to categories of people for hundreds of years. It's far more sane to simply agree to NOT discriminate based on race/gender/creed/religion/politics OR say that it is fair play to do so.
What kind of self-reinforcing social bubble have you created that makes you think those two are equivalent? You say "crime" and "was clearly guilty" for actions that are explicitly protected under the law. Do you know what crime is?
This is false. He resigned because he was a target of personal destruction campaign, and received no support from people who he had to work with/for. The was attacked by political activists and his organization threw him under the bus.
> Women who resigned because they are harassed are victims of discrimination
He was harassed plenty. Of course, not the same harassment - not of sexual kind - but it didn't make his environment less hostile, wasn't less related to work performance or wasn't less personally painful and hurtful. The only difference is that you think it's OK to harass him - because he deserved it for committing the thoughtcrime.
> The crime begets the punishment.
Here we get to the point. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is the crime, and be happy your punishment is only losing your job and not the room 101. We get it, believe me.
Therefore he supported the violation of human rights. People didn't like it, and he had to resign because he couldn't work anymore. That's it.
If you don't think violation of Human Rights and/or supporting it is a problem you can get behind Eich all you want.
You may think that's funny, but it does a disservice to your argument.
I did not say "the staff doesn't respect me". That would have been a lie.
Why don't you comment on things that you know about directly, or even just on reliable testimony?
Reading between your lines, I see malice and mendacity. Have you a better excuse?
I remember a blog post by @tofumatt, flip-flopping from pro- before to con- after I left. That is neither "staff" (plural) nor "Basically: the staff didn't respect him" evidence. It's a post from one person, who was not inside the room with C-level and board members, which assumed the worst: that I couldn't figure out how to lie my way through the crisis, so clearly didn't merit CEO. I can produce multiple others who supported me all the way from appointment to well past exit, including @christi3k and @lsblakk.
But really, what's your point? You weren't even at Mozilla, whether on the outside of the C-suite or on the inside. To assert "Basically, ..." as you did stinks of malice and mendacity. There's a five letter word for someone who assumes the worst about out-group members in advance of facts, who finds it "pretty easy to imagine" the worst of adversaries. It starts with "B" and ends with "T".
Maybe not direct instance. But if I were at Mozilla, I would have resigned because of him.
I mean, Eich was giving money to people campaigning for removing civil rights from people based on their sexual orientation. That's not a small thing - if it was race instead of sexuality, would you be okay with it? White Power CEO?
>A range of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television departments, programmes, and radio stations are currently offering highly desirable, paid internships, but white people are prohibited from applying.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/670266/BBC-advert-white-peo...
And to use the Daily Express to support any your point is going to reflect fairly poorly on your stance for anyone that is aware of it's reputation.
Also - are we talking about the US or the UK here? Mixing the two situations together in a single discussion is going to make a murky issue even murkier.
> Either you are allowed to discriminate based on race/creed/sexuality/politics or you aren't.
That's not what the law says. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents
The Equality Act allows people to discriminate if it's a proportionate way to achieve a legitimate aim.
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/discrimination/what-are-th...
>"we need good people first then good code will come later"
- paraphrased from a node.js zealot
Anyone who holds such discriminatory views should recognise that it will reduce their ability as a team player; it may not be enough to justify them losing their job, but it definitely counts as a negative against their skillset.
That said, most rational people can identify an opinion they disagree with without resorting to threatening the livelihood of the person espousing it.
The man made a $1,000 donation to support a view he believed in. He did nothing illegal or wrong and pledged promoting equality at Mozilla.
He then had a large concerted smear campaign run against him, with major sites threatening to block Firefox access unless Mozilla took action.
We have no way to know if you'd actually quit if you were in this situation; more likely you simply disagree with this view and see this as the easiest way to justify this situation as 'right'.
I disagree with Brandon Eich on this point, but I also disagree with how Mozilla and members of the LGBT community handled this.
The way this played out, and what it represents, introduces a chilling effect on honest political discussion/participation for anyone with opinions that might be considered offensive.
It sets a very bad precedent.
He made his choice and that stood against everything Mozilla stands for (freedom, privacy, etc etc). As a result of him making his choice he faced s lot of pressure, quite rightfully, and then he decided to step down. His choice.
You can speculate as much as you like about the ins and outs of it but it's just that. Speculation.
I also don't think this is a good precedent to set.
Yes, in this case it's all good and virtuous, but there is now an amorphously defined line for what you can or can't support politically.
It would be a much less divided and angry place.
One of my most important life lessons was to learn how to argue in support of positions that I strongly oppose or dislike.
If I only seek to deeply understand things that I support or agree with, then I will struggle to communicate with people from different cultures, or from people that have backgrounds that differ to my own.
This does not require that I agree with things that I oppose or dislike, but it does require that I understand why people disagree with me. Never have I found the answer to be "they are ignorant idiots and/or outright horrible people"
Making it a point to do this has helped me to develop a more nuanced view of the world, and has been essential as a manager, as I can not effectively communicate with the people that work with me unless I am willing to try and deeply understand them.
Effective management requires dealing with all manner of politics, and it helps build bridges and find mutually acceptable solutions when you can speak to both sides in their own language.