Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

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I really don't want to rehash this discussion, but there is one important inaccuracy in your presentation of what happened that keeps being propagated. As far as I could tell at the time, the people who Brendan would have had "authority and influence" over by and large didn't seem to feel that he should go. Some of them were fairly conflicted about the whole thing, but in the end felt that the things Mozilla works on should be important across the "traditional" left/right spectrum. And please don't forget that pretty much everyone who worked with Brendan was already aware of the donation, since it had been gone over in the press in 2008. So it's not like there was important new information coming to light for the people who he would have "authority and influence" over.

There were some comments on twitter calling on him to resign from some people at the Mozilla _Foundation_ (not to be confused with the _Corporation_), starting with one of the then-interns, iirc. The irony is that those particular people wouldn't have had any interaction with Brendan anyway...

Of course the reporting on the whole thing blew everything completely out of proportion, like the media usually does.

Oh, one other inaccuracy: I'd guess something like 1/3 of Mozilla's employees are in the SF bay area. Others are in other places, with a variety of cultural and political outlooks. So assuming that "Mozilla" is well-represented by "young, well-educated people in San Francisco" is not a great idea.

I stand corrected (and you have my upvote)!

I would say that a CEO’s authority and influence does need to extend well beyond the people they work with day-to-day (though I doubt this is a point of disagreement).

Do you have any thoughts on the parent discussion?

My main thought on the parent discussion is that it should be possible for two reasonable people to cooperate on achieving a goal, including a political goal, even if their politics otherwise do not align very well (or at all). If a "left-leaning" organization is organizing encrypted email, and you want to push for encrypted email, it may make sense to support them in that endeavor even if you disagree with their other goals. If the Koch brothers are pushing for an end to asset forfeiture and you think that needs to happen, feel free to push with them, even if you disagree with other things they do.

Of course there may be other tradeoffs, and maybe there are other organizations that aim for the same goal that are more closely aligned with one's views, and then it may make sense to support those. But the important thing for me is not having everything decided by ideological litmus tests. Results matter more than affiliations, at least for me. I'm not sure that's true of everyone...

You are mixing up two different things here. It's true that individuals inevitably have complex, multidimensional views on reality and, therefore, need to concentrate on cooperation based on shared interests. An organization, particularly one based on volunteering and donations, on the other hand, can and should choose a narrow set of goals and pursue them without taking any more sides than necessary. Otherwise people may and will withhold support for that organization because they disagree with its secondary goals.

Political bias is generally supposed to be bad for business, and the current tendency of tech companies to take active political stance is a sign that something very rotten has happened to the public discourse. Indeed: entire sectors of society (mass media, universities, now tech companies) are becoming increasingly hostile towards still widespread conservative views, excluding huge sections of the population from political debate and deligitimizing their views. That population is now oppressed and unable to advocate their views in a public way, but they can still vote, so now USA has leftist mass media going nuts over the election of President Trump. But it's not going to end there: when the conservatives realize that Trump has failed to turn this oppression around, it might come to violence and who knows what else.

> An organization, particularly one based on volunteering and donations, on the other hand, can and should choose a narrow set of goals and pursue them without taking any more sides than necessary.

First, even given a narrow set of goals you can end up with other organizations that are aligned with your organization on some but not all of those goals.

Second, my point is that when someone _is_ aligned with your organization on its narrow set of goals, they may be worth working with even if you may disagree with other goals they have. The devil is, as usual, in the details.

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