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Comment by bluefox | Hacker News Reader

Censor thyself!

For your expression of opinion may some day be used to provoke the wrath of an angry mob...

Anonymity helps somewhat. If instead of donating $1000 and putting his name on a public list he'd wait a few years and donate 1000 BTC to the same cause from an undisclosed address, Mozilla would have been forced to find something else to use against him in order to remove him from that position. Maybe just ask nicely instead of pulling these shenanigans.

Censor thyself. This is the world we're living in. It's just sound advice to help keep you safe. Not just from a state or a church, but from the everyday he and she, they and them.

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I think he got what he wanted. He was the CEO of a tech company in San Francisco. If he's the kind of person that is willing to spend his own money to lobby for decreased human rights for a certain group of people that widely exists in his organization and community, he probably picked the wrong job.

A lot of people are saying, "he made one mistake, and now he's paying too high a price." Let me ask you: have you ever mistakenly donated $1000 to anyone? Didn't think so.

Whatever his opinion is, that is irrelevant to my post.

Pretty sure he didn't ask for an angry mob. I'm betting his life will be much harder now. His mistake, according to my post, was to express his opinion in public.

The moral of this story is that, for the well-being of oneself, all opinions should be kept private. That is the way things are.

A risky alternative to keeping them to oneself is to express them "anonymously".

If the opinion you're expressing is hateful and akin to calling fellow humans second hand citizens, then yes, you should probably censor that. Really, you should better yourself, but if not, then you probably want to be careful about making such statements in public.

Consider if he had donated to a charity trying to deny marriage rights to non-white people. I don't think you'd see much defense of his position.

You're saying that if an opinion is such-and-such, shut up. All I'm saying, is that the antecedent is irrelevant. You should shut up either way. Why?

You have an opinion. It is not shared by all people.

In circles where your opinion is disagreeable to many, it can be very easy to rally them against you. We've not (yet?) progressed beyond this. You may one day find yourself in such a circle, or near it. And one day your expression of that opinion, "hateful" or not, may be used against you.

So whatever your opinion is, keep it to yourself. It's a jungle out there. I do not envy Brendan Eich.

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