"the moment you attack one of the best organizations"
Nobody attacked Mozilla. You're totally off base.
Nobody attacked Mozilla. You're totally off base.
When Brandon Eich exercises his freedom of speech to donate money to a cause that was harmful to many mozillans, that's somehow NOT an attack on non-heteronormative Californians, BUT when OkCupid exercises their freedom of speech to encourage use a different webbrowser, that IS an attack on Brandon Eich?
Maybe you could draw the class a map of what kinds of speech are OK and what kinds of speech are unfair attacks.
I don't know that I particularly agree with your opinion, or at least, I know I don't agree that it was less of an attack than Brandon Eich's actions. So I was attempting to understand your response.
It's rather odd to complain that posting your opinion in public provoked a response. If you're not interested in having a conversation, I'd suggest that the wisest course of action is not to post.
You seem to be of the opinion that exercising free speech cannot be an attack, which I call bullshit on. If free speech were not powerful, we wouldn't protect it so fiercely. The right to free speech comes with the responsibility for what you say, and what OK Cupid and Brenden Eich said when exercising their right had repercussions they have to take responsibility for. "I don't like X" has different repercussions depending on the person who says it; OK Cupid advocating boycotts of Firefox is them exercising free speech to a large userbase, free speech which had consequences for Mozilla which surely objectively were negative.
Either they are ignorant of the consequences or they chose their words to cause the consequences which they knew would be negative. The latter is an attack.
Quite the opposite, actually.
It's just that I have trouble caring about the negative repercussions from OkCupid saying "please visit our site using some other product" vs the negative repercussions for thousands of Californians, among them many mozillans, of Brandon Eich saying "here is $1000 to help make sure these people stay second-class citizens. Here's $1000 to make sure Alice's long-term partner can be denied access to her in the hospital. Here's $1000 to actively hurt other human beings".
At the end of the day, OkCupid wasn't out to deny Eich fundamental human rights. It's like complaining about the brightness of a candle held next to the noon-day sun
Boycotting a company because of not wanting the CEO is not an attack on the company. It is expressing that you really don't like / disagree / hate / whatever the company.
I strongly dislike Brendan Eich was made a CEO. I don't want to support Mozilla in any way and I would've been very critical about Mozilla. Knowing that he supported prop 8 and then knowingly making him a CEO is not the company / organization I supported (fyi: I've triaged 600+ bugs, used to be a Bugzilla developer, have git.mozilla.org commit access, etc).
I would not have given a f* about Eich if I didn't care about Mozilla.
However hopefully everyone on that whole spectrum will agree -- and never forget -- how OkCupid and Sam Yagan decided to step into it and act like opportunistic hypocrites.
And hopefully everyone on that spectrum will give their support to Mozilla now, because it makes the internet a better place for all of us.
Several calls to boycotts, several petitions asking for the resignation of our CEO, demonstrations, insults, death threats, ...
Note that the situation is pretty symmetric: we now get from the conservatives what we got from the liberals two weeks ago.
After all, if we (average Germans) applied our own present-day human rights views in the same way, we'd be boycotting organizations with CEOs that are homophobes, death penalty proponents, religious extremists, pro-lifers and so forth.