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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

There is a reason why voting machines have curtains. If you resent people judging you for how you vote, just don't tell them.

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Don't ask. Don't tell.

It wasn't a great policy before. It's not great now. Hiding who you are to avoid ridicule doesn't solve the problem. If the majority opinion is safe to express, but your opinion isn't, then being forced to hide doesn't actually solve the problem. Even if you hide your views, you may get asked why you don't support the majority's viewpoints.

I see it less as a "policy" and more of an issue of maturity and professionalism. If you are going to take a controversial stance on something you have to accept that you might not be Mr. Joe Popular after that. This is true at work and in life. So you either let it go or get okay with being "that weirdo."

As others have said, it goes both ways: liberal in a red state, conservative in a blue state.

At the end of the day, the people you meet at work are not there because they want to be friends. They're there for one reason: to make money. If you respect other people's boundaries then they respect you.

If sexual orientation were a matter of choice, DADT wouldn't have been as controversial

Arguably political orientation is not a choice if your political choices are informed solely by facts. Unless you are arguing that facts can be whatever you want.

I think the reason this is all coming to a head now is that it's harder to hide your opinions, or rather it's easier to unintentionally air them to a broader audience than you might prefer. Social media makes it too easy to inadvertently make a political statement. See elsewhere in this thread where a commenter mentions being unfriended by people for congratulating his sister on her wedding to another woman. It's easier for people to police the details of their acquaintances lives and it's harder to hide your differences by compartmentalizing. It's probably a good thing in the long term because people are becoming more accepting, but in the short term it's definitely introducing frictions where otherwise a little tact could avoid a conflict altogether.

See also: Brendan Eich, who was booted from his job at Mozilla because someone went digging to find his personal voting record and found something they didn't like.

What happened to Eich is another issue entirely. The article is about people getting into political arguments with their co-workers and then getting upset when those co-workers don't want to be their friend anymore.

Yes, but this thread is about people being "punished" by large groups for voting differently from those groups (and how difficult it is to "keep your politics at home" when those groups go to your "home" to track down your politics and decide whether to "punish" you)

Nobody looked into Eich's voting record. Eich donated to a campaign against gay marriage, and donations above a certain threshold are public record. Gay people and people who support civil rights who are strong enough coders to work for Mozilla will easily find employment at any of a number of other Bay Area employers run by people who support them. Mozilla was losing developers[1], and Eich took the reasonable action of stepping down instead of destroying his organization. You can imagine a CEO spending money to bring back California's antimiscegenation laws and how Asian employees and their allies would react.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3028664/lgbt-programmers-speak-o...

So someone went looking into the public voting record, presumably to find things they could exploit to get rid of him.

How is this different to what the OP said?

Once again, it's not his voting record. He donated to a campaign that vilified gays.[1] It was publicized years before he was offered the CEO role and had already made gay Mozilla employees uncomfortable[2], but it's obviously different working with somebody who vilifies you vs. working for somebody who does.

The gay employees of Mozilla were understandably upset when he became CEO, and since the Bay Area in general is pretty progressive, many other employees were also upset. They were looking for new employers.

I gave an anti-miscegenation analogy earlier. How is this different from a CEO making a public donation to The Daily Stormer (perhaps pointing to the stories of Judas and Cain as justification) and the Jewish and non-white employees and their allies not wanting to work for him? You cannot take public action to vilify your employees and deny them civil rights and expect them to keep working for you.

[1] https://youtu.be/pSb3jiuIhUM

[2] http://observer.com/2012/04/tech-celeb-makes-prop-8-donation...

Except sometimes it's public information. Brendan Eich was pilloried not for telling people how he voted, but for having made a contribution to an unpopular cause several years past.

There's no value in dredging this back up. People are pretty set in their opinions on it. You're not going to be convined that what he did was worse than just having an opinion. No one on the other side will be convinced donating to a campaign of hate against them is harmless.

You already see why posting that was a bad idea because you're primed to argue, even though you know it won't go anywhere.

The irony in the furor over Brendan Eich is that it is well out of proportion. I worked with Mozilla long enough to recall the time when a community engagement manager soliticed calls for donations to an anti-gay-marriage organization on his blog, which was replicated to Planet Mozilla. There were no calls to boycott Mozilla or to fire said person for that act.

I bring it up because the outrage is clearly so manufactured, not because I'm "primed to argue, even though I know it won't go anywhere."

"An unpopular cause" being one that was supported by around half the electorate at the time, IIRC.

Unpopular with a powerful lobby within the liberal tech industry, yes.

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