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Liberal Mob Claims Another Scalp — Jon Gabriel
Brendan Eich, a successful developer and tech legend, was recently named the CEO for Mozilla Corporation. The for-profit venture is most closely associated with their open-source Firefox web browser.
But after his appointment, a dark secret emerged about Eich’s past. Was it embezzlement or child endangerment? Terrorism or even murder? Even worse. Six years ago, he donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the state.
This personal view, which in 2008 was supported by the majority of California voters and President Obama himself, is now a firing offense in the U.S. Under intense pressure from Silicon Valley activists, Eich has stepped down as CEO and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it.
Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of Mozilla announced the change on the company’s blog:
Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.
Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all.
We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public. This is meant to distinguish Mozilla from most organizations and hold us to a higher standard. But this time we failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community.
Of course, this statement utterly contradicts the company’s cowardly submission to a technofascist lynch mob, but that’s beside the point. Diversity is Conformity. Tolerance is Intolerance. Freedom is Slavery.
As the witch hunt grew, Eich insisted that he would not step down. “I don’t want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we’ve been going,” he said in one interview. “I don’t believe they’re relevant.”
But in a world where the press exposes political donor lists and the IRS demands to know the content of our prayers, the personal is always political. And now, professional.
Published in General
It doesn’t seem likely. But, the dominant culture appears to be on the way to accepting a broader definition of marriage, so the best we can probably hope for is what I outlined above. Government that involves elections is going to eventually reflect the dominant culture, so it doesn’t make sense to empower government to enforce ideas of traditional marriage. The best approach in my opinion is to reduce the influence of government in such issues and work on changing the culture.
Government tends to attract progressive-minded people who are never going to be friends of anything traditional, so it’s best to reduce their influence. I believe more people can be persuaded to reduce the size of government – an issue that affects their pocketbooks directly – than to get excited about gay marriage, which they don’t see as an issue that affects them.
Gee, thanks for going there. As if this issue weren’t polarizing enough…
But since we’ve already opened the door to morally convenient analogies, as Sal has said, your position is like someone saying that, because the Soviets used horrible, vicious tactics as a matter of course agains the Wermacht, their resistance to Hitler was unjustified.
Seriously though, did one of the side’s on that front have to win? But to me, the Soviet/Communist analogy doesn’t wash. After all the Communists didn’t explicitly condemn people and hound them from work because of their religion as the first step to redefining the right way of thinking for a nation.
It’s the Nazis who did that!
P.S. I condemn my own post for violating Godwin’s Law.
Actually, I don’t need a gun to my head to pay my taxes. But I do agree with you re Eich.
Good! Firefox sucks.
You need to look up “Lysenkoism” and the history of the Moscow show trials. Religion is just one of the pretexts for purging the opposition and discrediting its ideas.
I work in a government office. Co-workers that I know and trust I’ll open up to and be friendly with. Otherwise I’m tight lipped and reserved.
It’s the best defense mechanism towards people who may be intolerant and bigoted towards people like me (Christian, heterosexual, white man).
In general my response to the Left’s jihad against us is to continue in society hidden while living my real life at home with my family. Kind of like a secret Jew in Spain during the Inquisition.
Joseph this is well put, including the bullet points that 2.0 seems to have clipped from my quote of your comment. That it can’t work any other way in our society is the reason that the real choice before us is between getting SSM along with the loss of other freedoms versus affirming marriage as-is along with same sex couples continuing to pretty much live as they please.
(Tom, I know you’ll disagree with that assessment or disassociate your support for SSM from that outcome, but I think you might come to regret your support as any benefits – assuming there will be any – will be far outweighed by the loss of freedom we’ll see)
So opponents of SSM are the Wermacht in your analogy?
I’m a little shell-shocked Mozilla did that. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in the open source world.
Tom, I think the better counter analogy for your position is this:
The French revolution was terrible in method, ideology, and outcome. Rebellion against the monarchy was still justified, though. It would have been better if the rebellion had been prosecuted in a better way by better people than it actually was.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of a simple loss of freedom, though. I think the left’s record and position on civil rights is deterioating. Civil rights are now something to be granted to the deserving and taken away from the undeserving. We may be on the verge of seeing the left’s credibility there collapse. I do wish the courts had stayed out of the issue, though. The courts killed any possibility of a political and social compromise between social conservatives and gay couples when it became clear that they were going to settle the issue. I think that’s why there’s such a scorched-earth feel to SSM politics; there no longer any incentive for either side to compromise, because the issue is no longer within the realm of democratic decision making.
#104 Joseph Eagar
Astute observation on rights allocation and surely, if sadly true.
Re the courts, this has been one of those “consenting adults” situations: SSM extremists have been going to the courts as a deliberate tactic to subvert legislatively-expressed popular/majoritarian will in numerous jurisdictions; and the courts have avidly seized on the role requested of them by the SSM extremists — questions of standing (that of the SSM extremist petitioners) be damned, to say nothing of questions of state-level constitutionality (as in the 57, er, 50 states).
I’m tempted to suggest that the EPA-collusive “sue-and-settle” racket with anti-capitalist/anti-private-property-rights environmentalist groups hath wrought such a state of affairs, i.e., showing the SSM fascists how it’s done.
Jon made a new word: Technofascist. I like the word, it’s so expressive!
Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.
Especially if you’re a woman named Mitchell. Could those four sentences be any more nonsensical?
We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public.
not anymore you don’t. a great example of double-talk.
Well stated. Contemporary jurisprudence has a great deal to answer for.
This is why our government is a tempered democracy. Republicanism mutes the effects of the powers of mobs. One of the reasons our society has worked so well is that we’ve been able to isolate the personal from the political. Now that OKCupid, Mozilla and A&E are playing thought police, what’s going to happen next? A hyper factionalized society in which we can only do business with those who share the same political beliefs as us? I don’t dispute that this was all legal (and no one here seems to be arguing this); I vehemently disagree that this was proper behavior in a free society.
Edit: -???- This was a post in response to Mithio’s #42 post. I thought this would be nested. The page led me to believe my post would be nested. Where is my nesting? Also, word limit counter is broken.
I don’t know how to fight this.
Am I supposed to stop using Firefox? Does Chromium Browser come in Windows flavor? Am I supposed to give up trying to pick up girls who love everything but rap or rap & country off the internet? Who would have thought the new dark age would come painted in pastels?
There is, yes.
This is why some of us use pseudonyms. I work for a company with HQ in California.
I agree that’s a better analogy.
Honestly, I’m getting there. The pro-SSM crowd has been so consistently nasty and classless that it’s getting harder for me to associate with them at all (and this has never been an issue that motivates my voting or donations).
That said, I maintain that the real culprits on the loss-of-freedom front are public accomodation laws. The more I think about it the more harmful I think they are, outside of circumstances such as the South immediately after Jim Crow. I really think we need to fight these, and I’m happy to be called a racist/homophobe if that’s what it takes.
Mega dittos on the need to get rid of public accomodation laws. I think there was a time when they were justified but that time has long past and it’s going to make any sort of peaceful compromise between SSM advocates & opponents very difficult. Unfortunately, I see no politically plausible way of getting rid of public accomodation laws. Too many people have it in their heads (and will have it reinforced over and over by the media) that the loss of them will suddenly return us to Jim Crow days.
I agree with Tom. The recent uproar in Arizona was horrifying; it showed that the gay lobby is drunk with its own power. I think Tom is also right about public accomodation laws, though I tend to think all discrimination laws are bad (they discriminate against the politically unorganized).
Charles Cooke at National Review wrote a very good analysis of the whole affair and its implications. I especially liked this passage: “How quickly has liberty been transmuted into orthodoxy. For the entirety of human history, gay marriage was a veritable non-issue — a thought that had occurred seriously to nobody and for which there was neither a meaningful constituency nor measurable pressure. In the space of a decade it has moved from a fringe and novel proposition to a moral imperative — and, now, to fodder for the new inquisitors. That the issue has now achieved the approval of a narrow majority is to my mind no bad thing. That the movement’s more vocal champions have started bludgeoning their enemies one and a half minutes into their still-fragile victory speaks tremendously ill of them, and does not portend well for the republic.”
Amen to that!
In the South segregation was not merely permitted but required by law. That’s what the phrase “Jim Crow laws” means, right? So it seems entirely plasuible that striking down all the Jim Crow laws as unconstitutional, integrating all government-run facilites such as schools, plus social pressure would have been sufficient even in that extreme case to eliminate nearly all instances of segregation w/o resorting to public accomodation laws.
Chromium is an open-source project sponsored by Google that has spawned a whole family of browsers, including the official Google build of Chrome, Epic “the privacy browser,” and several others described here.
Thanks!
How have y’all missed that his head was put on a pike pour encourager les autres? What do you think this will do to political donations in the future, especially to unpopular or potentially unpopular causes? Were they merely exercising their right to terminate at will, and hey, we believe in their autonomy, so we can’t really criticize?
This is their message: Think twice before you write that check, biggit, or risk our wrath. There will be no conscientious objection to this project: there will be only pain.
Because you have it coming.
Indeed. The use of thuggish tactics by some can not by itself discredit a particular position.
For illustration of this: consider the pro-life movement, and the nuts who shoot doctors.