Corrosive Conformity
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
Mozilla backed Eich the whole way as far as I remember. They initially shrugged off rarebit's reaction with the standard "we should all respect personal opinions" (except for the personal opinions of people affected by Eich's actions, of course).
It's not the message, it's how it is delivered.
cough
* http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richar...
* http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/pr-executive-j...
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/10/busines...
* http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/paul-graham-responds-to-cri...
In any event, there have been plenty of regimes in history where you needed to be a member of The Party and toe the party line... and if not, you'd be ineligible for any position of power, and maybe out of a job. Perhaps your nation had a revolution, and the party in question is Communists. Perhaps it's merely a Reformation, and you're just not allowed to be Catholic anymore (or a counter-reformation, and you're not allowed to be Protestant). Maybe it's just the local banana republic.
And this is purely a partisan-affiliation play. No one has seriously asserted that Eich was mean to any individual gay person, influenced company policy in a way that said gay people are unwelcome, or anything of that nature.
In any event, it's quite clear that at least some portion of our society -- the one Mozilla operates in -- works under the guiding principles of those regimes. How modern of us!
The article makes some good points and some weak arguments (the Obama comparison is bizarre), but the author makes little distinction between holding a differing view and contributing to causes that (IMO) encourage discrimination and unjust inequality.
In other words, I think it's fair game to boycott and protest supporters of anti-gay-marriage bills, but we (myself included) should have focused on something with greater impact - a "real" bad guy. There are hundreds of politicians who are actively working against equal rights, and a lot of big money going to them and pro-discrimination PACs. For those who support equality in marriage, that's a better place to start.
But where does it end? Do people start boycotting companies because one of their board members are not opposed to abortion? Do people start boycotting companies because the CEO feels that Michael Jackson was not a pedophile?
In the end my favorite quote on free speech: "Sir, I disagree with you whole-heartedly, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Also, what if since then he has changed his mind? These things happen, people had wrong opinions and through argument have changed them.
> "Sir, I disagree with you whole-heartedly, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
I support his right to be a bigot. I do not, however, want a bigot running an organization that is important to me, and I (and many others whose opinions matter far more than mine) said so (our right).
Many were not even asking for him to leave his post, just for him to disown his previous acts (acts, not beliefs) and maybe a comp (e.g. equivalent donation to anti-bullying orgs were floated around) as a show of good will.
According to Google, "bigotry" is defined as "having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others."
I'm getting confused here, since English is not my native language -- but how's Eich a bigot, and the other side of the barricade not? In fact, according to that definition, how are the people who ousted him not the bigger bigots? Just wondering.
In his case he was (at least partially) trying to deny a group of people (homosexuals and other derivatives) the right to Marry a same-sex partner and have equal protection under the law. Note this issue is similar to people protesting that a black man should not be allowed to legally marry a white woman just a few decades ago.
Here's a definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot
* this person has a different model of the structure of the world than we do
* we do not wish to recognize (or are not capable of recognizing, or have not been informed) that it is possible or intellectually valid to use a different model of the structure of the world than we do
* assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people
* therefore he must not think they should be treated as people, and is bad. we should call him names and try to impugn his ability to empathize and/or be intellectually consistent.
Any relation of this to the dictionary definition is coincidental.
For your personal edification: the real question about gay marriage is a what marriage is (and what the government should recognize), not about whether gay people are people. If you believe that marriage is primarily about an emotional commitment between two arbitrary people, then the only logical conclusion is to support gay marriage. If you're old-school and think in the general case that it has something more to do with children and families and sexual reproduction (notwithstanding current practices to the contrary), then you may support measures like Prop 8 or Amendment 1. It is this difference in attitudes which drives the issue and drives enough voter turnout to pass measures like Prop 8 -- not bigotry and hatred, but defending something that these people care about, Marriage and Family. This is also why it's called the "Defense of Marriage Act"; it's a defense.
These supporters of gay marriage long ago internalized the notion of marriage as an emotional commitment between.... well, let's say N arbitrary people, not always 2.
> * assuming that you use the same model as we do, it is impossible to support Prop 8 unless you also think that gay people don't deserve to be treated as people
If the only advantage marriage conferred was being allowed to make babies, then I would agree with you. The problem is that marriage confers a bunch of additional benefits (including hospital visitation and inheritance with less drama).
Additionally, there is no need to be married to have children, and there is no need to have children to be married, so the whole "marriage is about kids" thing is, frankly, really, really hard to take seriously.
So by supporting Prop 8, people were saying "gay people do not deserve the privileges mentioned above even through straight people who don't intend to have kids can have those privileges".
If this is really about children and families, where is the movement to prevent infertile straight people from getting married, or just people who have no intention of having children. They are ruining the tradition just as much as gay people supposedly would.
In the meantime, as an exercise, let's do some reasoning about what people might hypothetically think, with the example of "infertile straight people".
First, infertile straight people commonly are unaware of their infertility until such time as they are actually interested in having children, which occurs late in the traditional order of [marriage, sex, children]. Perhaps someone could think that enforcing this question up front is impractically difficult, and this is a defect of the current regime. Perhaps someone could think that it's important that you're willing to have children before you enter marriage, but that subsequent discovery of infertility doesn't dissolve the marriage. Perhaps the issue didn't really occur to the person in question -- the media coverage of the issue is nil, so awareness has got to be pretty limited. Perhaps there are actually such movements, and you're just unaware of them. (For instance, were you aware of Sixtus V's decree of 27 June 1587?)
Perhaps the people with these opinions are silly and wrong to think what they think: from time to time, people can and are intellectually inconsistent. Perhaps this is the result of a something that invokes an inconsistent pattern of reasoning about the matter, such as a politician of an unfavored political party promoting the matter, or perhaps they were exposed to some cultural artifact depicting gay marriage in combination with a celebration of human sexuality in a way that the person in question found disgusting. Or perhaps they have a prejudice against gay people that falls short of being an un-person but which affects reasoning about relevant topics in an unfair and negative way (as is commonly suggested in a variety of racial-sensitivity contexts).
The issue isn't about rights, its about equal treatment and equal privileges.
However, I disagree with you on "It is not possible to support Prop 8 without treating gay people as though they are not people." That would be like saying "It is not possible to support progressive tax rates without treating 'rich' people as though they are not people."
Results of Prop 8, to wit: No one was charged with a felony. No one was charged with a misdemeanor. No one was charged with an infraction. No one was fined, arrested, detained, or jailed. Criminalization!!!
(Determining whether "the mob" that forced Eich to step down, the phrase against which Dash protests, is similarly loaded or not: is left as an exercise to the HN reader.)
When has fertility been a requirement for marriage? I haven't heard anyone suggest that infertile couples should be denied the right to marriage, so I don't buy that this has anything to do with children or reproduction.
Then you'd expect that to be one of the things addressed in the response once the issue is raised.
"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. This man donated money to a campaign designed to keep LGBT people from full equality and to deny our families equal rights under the law. He was free to make that choice, but we are free to hold him accountable. If he'd donated money to White Supremacists to help outlaw interracial marriage, there'd be little outcry over his ouster".
It's not conformity, but Mozilla stands for a set of values, among those equality, which is not compatible with the values publicly demonstrated by Eich.
"I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in "core political speech, the 'primary object of First Amendment protection.' "
- Dissenting in part, _Citizens United vs FEC_. Regarding Proposition 8, and the fact that the law compelled the disclosure of donors and made all this donation information public to begin with.
If not, it's just that he is not suited to run the Mozilla Foundation after stating publicly he does not agree with one of the core values of the foundation and its contributors. If it were the case, he could have apologized and say he changed his mind. If he didn't change his mind, again, he is not suitable to run a foundation where many core contributors have strong moral feelings about equality.
Want proof? In 2011, a Notre Dame Board of Trustees member was pressured to resign because of her donations to a pro-choice group. Not only did the National Review not have a problem with her resignation, they published a feature criticizubg Notre Dame at length[1] for appointing her to begin with and in general not upholding pro-life only Catholic values.
So you'll forgive me if I think this article is bullshit and its arguments completely specious.
I await your downvotes.
[1]: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269303/more-cracks-go...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/mozillas...
I completely agree that a lot of the rhetoric is completely tribal (this side is right, the other side is wrong, now let's sling mud and accuse the other side of X!). But some people (in fact, a lot of Hacker News) does seem to get beyond this.
I don't know Mozilla's process, but if I were just making a casual observance, I'd say they were determined to hire the guy without using all the resources available to determine whether he was the best candidate for the job.
The slippery slope argument is bullshit. "Where do we draw the line?" Well, let's see: if he has simply voted Republican, he'd have been fine. If he'd have voted for Prop 8 but contributed no money to it, there wouldn't be a money trail to show that he's a bigot. He'd probably fine until he got himself into the potential HR fiasco that would have damaged Mozilla a great deal more than they've been for not doing a proper executive search. But neither of those happened. Instead, he left a money trail to specifically support a bigoted cause.
There's the line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6K9dS9wl7U
tl;dv: "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and woman ... For me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union .. you know, God's in the mix. ... I’m not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do believe in civil unions.”
If you mean the topic actually at issue -- California's Prop. 8 -- that's true, but not on the side you suggest:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Obama-opposes-proposed-ba...
--[quote]--
John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Gay rights moved to the forefront of the presidential campaign Tuesday after Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's announcement that he opposes a November ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage in California.
In a letter to San Francisco's Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, the presumptive presidential nominee said he opposed "the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution" and similar efforts in other states.
--[end quote]--
It looks like the younger generations are much more likely to be pro-life, and it will be interesting to see if pro-choice people will be haunted for their views going forward.
If denying denying civil marriage to gay partners incurs such wrath - I dearly hope that the our pro-life children will find it possible to forgive us.
Nonsense.
A two-party political horse race is not analogous. If you don't like one or more views your closest candidate has, the ONLY other alternative is often MUCH worse on the whole, not only for your issue of choice, but a range of them.
Compare that to selecting a leader of an organization that is not structured to return profit to shareholders, but instead carry out a social and ethical objective and it is easy to see why a leader that is NOT ethical (in the view of significant numbers of people inside the org and "customers/users" outside the org) would be deemed not qualified to hold the job. Couple that with plethora of other viable candidates (as opposed to the two-person horse race of a presidential run), and the analogy doesn't just fall flat, it refuses to exist.